OOH, Shiny!

During the last few weeks, as we've watched first Michele Bachmann anointed by the Washington punditocracy as Palin-with-a-brain, and then watch them fall in (and quickly out of) love with yet another dimwitted Texas governor in cowboy boots, it's struck me just how much this presidential race on the GOP side really IS, as Jon Stewart so accurately said last week, a race for the mayoralty of Pundittown.

It's not that the press falling in love with someone else every five minutes is anything new; we saw it in 2004 when Howard Dean made the cover of Newsweek when he was surging, and once it looked like he could actually win the thing, they covered a a rally he held after the Iowa caucuses in which he was trying to lift the spirits of his dispirited campaign workers and conveniently turned the volume down on the crowd noise to make him look like a madman. We certainly saw in in 2008, where the choice of a wife of a former president with whom their relationship was already tumultuous, and a black freshman Senator, for the Democratic nomination, had them so confounded they didn't know what to do. We also saw it when the guy they've been in love with for years, John McCain, selected an attractive bubblebrain to be the potential backup to a septuagenarian cancer survivor.

But this year the fickleness of the punditocracy has reached the point of ridiculousness, because whom they love can turn on a dime, and often on a daily basis. And this year, for some reason, they're like teenaged boys with a double standard -- they love their chosen one until he puts out (i.e. declares candidacy) and then suddenly the one they pursued for so long doesn't look so good anymre. As long as Rick Perry wasn't running, he was the Coveted One. Then after he declared, the press covered his cammpaign with the fervor of a fifteen-year-old who's still huffing the euphoria of those first few nights in the back seat of a car...until Perry offered up the equivalent of a fart during sex, and then suddenly the Pursued and Won One became just another failed candidate.

So now, as has happened before whenever the punditocracy gets restless, their attention turns to New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, which is striking only because they seem to have skipped over the logical next choice for their affections, Herman Cain, who trounced all others in the Florida straw poll last weekend. After all, if Michele Bachmann became Chuck Todd's next choice for the presidency after winning the Iowa straw poll, who shouldn't Herman Cain get some lovin' after even MORE decisively winning Florida's straw poll? Gee, I wonder why....

So off they go, chubby-chasing Chris Christie. What they forget is that as recently as June, Christie's approval rating in the state where we actually have to deal with him was just 43%:

Respondents objected to a variety of Christie’s policies, with 65% opposing his cuts in education spending, 58% opposing his removal of a surcharge on the state’s highest earners, and 51% opposing the cancellation of a planned tunnel to New York.

Christie’s favorability rating is now at 43%, while teachers, whom he tussled with on benefits and pay, are at 76%. “Teachers I know got laid off because of him,” said one respondent. “He’s not in favor of the average working person.” That view seemed pervasive: 68% believed Christie stands with the business community, while just 22% said he sides with “ordinary New Jerseyans.”

Now he's up at 54%, which these days is a perfectly fine rating, but still means that almost half the state doesn't like what he's doing. The Star-Ledger may think that Christie's tough stands with the unions accounts for his popularity, but as a denizen of New Jersey, I can tell you that the improvement in his ratings can be attributed to just six words, uttered as Hurricane Irene was approaching our coastline: "Get the hell off the beach." There isn't a person in this state who didn't applaud him for cutting right to the chase. He also gained respect from even those of us who disagree with him when he had the guts to call someone who was asking about protection from sharia law "crazy." These are Christie-the-regular-guy at his best. The problem is that the flip side of Christie-the-regular-guy is Christie-the-bully and Christie-the-hothead. Everyone seems to have forgotten that while he did a great job before and after the hurricane, he kind of HAD to, since he was off on vacation during last winter's blizzard.

Like George W. Bush, this is a guy who charges full speed ahead, certain of the correctness of every move he makes, every word that comes out of his mouth. But it's one thing to tell people who think it'd be fun to stand in the pounding surf during the hurricane not to be assholes. It's quite another when someone with a complete lack of internal word filter is handling delicate discussions with, oh, say, Pakistan.

There is video after video after video of Chris Christie saying he's not ready ot be persident. We agree. But the siren song of GOP apparatchiks who embraced the Teabag Monster and now are completely unable to control it, and the flowers-and-candy being offered by a smitten Washington punditocracy, may be impossible for him to resist. So I suspect he will run, and he'll have a joyful few first dates, until he farts. Then they'll find another girl about whom to fantasize.

But lies are part of the IOKIYAR rule

When you're a Republican, you can lie with impunity and the media will continue to applaud. As long as you're emphatic about what you say, and you say it with macho pride, the manly-men of the media and the Republican Party will call you "a strong leader":

New Jersey’s public-sector unions routinely pressure the State Legislature to give them what they fail to win in contract talks. Most government workers pay nothing for health insurance. Concessions by school employees would have prevented any cuts in school programs last year.

Statements like those are at the core of Gov. Chris Christie’s campaign to cut state spending by getting tougher on unions. They are not, however, accurate.

In fact, on the occasions when the Legislature granted the unions new benefits, it was for pensions, which were not subject to collective bargaining — and it has not happened in eight years. In reality, state employees have paid 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health insurance since 2007, in addition to co-payments and deductibles, and since last spring, many local government workers, including teachers, do as well. The few dozen school districts where employees agreed to concessions last year still saw layoffs and cuts in academic programs.

“Clearly there has been a pattern of the governor playing fast and loose with the details,” said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University. “But so far, he’s been adept at getting the public to believe what he says.”

Mr. Christie, a Republican who took office in January 2010, would hardly be the first politician to indulge in hyperbole or gloss over facts. But his misstatements, exaggerations and carefully constructed claims belie the national image he has built as a blunt talker who gives straight answers to hard questions, especially about budgets and labor relations. Candor is central to Mr. Christie’s appeal, and a review of his public statements over the past year shows some of them do not hold up to scrutiny.

[snip]

Misstatements have been central to Mr. Christie’s worst public stumbles — about how the state managed to miss out on a $400 million education grant last year, for example, and whether he was in touch enough while he was in Florida during the blizzard in December — and his rare admissions that he was wrong. But Peter J. Woolley, a politics professor and polling director at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said there had been no sign, so far, that these issues had much effect on the governor’s political standing.

“People prefer directness to detail,” Professor Woolley said. “People know it’s not unusual for politicians to take the shortcut in public debate, that they’re not academics who are going to qualify everything.”

It's one thing to take shortcuts. It's one thing to try to explain things in a way someone who can't handle a more complex concept than 2 + 2 can understand. But it's another to outright lie and call it "straight talk" as long as it's done emphatically. This is what got us into an expensive, intractable and unnecessary war in Iraq based on lies about weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. This is what Bernie Madoff did when he convinced people that his 18% returns when the markets were flailing around were real. Just because you say something loudly doesn't make it true. And it's high time the media started doing their homework instead of this worship of "straight talk" that isn't straight at all.

Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Blue Girl, who has had quite enough of the media drawing false equivalency between the merely opinionated left and the batshit crazy violent right.

Money quote (it's a long one, but go read the whole thing and show BG some love in the comments...or even better, donate over there:

So I have some questions for Howard.  

I wonder if he would care to share some information with us that he seems to have in his possession that the rest of us have missed. How many fringe lefties who hang on every word of Maddow or Olberman have walked into Holy Roller churches and opened up on the parishoners with a shotgun because they "hate conservatives"? Where is our Jim D. Adkisson, who was a die-hard O'Reilley and Hannity devotee? I missed that story, somehow.

And remind me how many lefties have gotten into shootouts with cops? Where is our Richard Poplawski? He's the man in Pittsburgh who armed himself to the teeth, donned body armor and laid in wait.  He met the two officers who responded to his mother's domestic violence call at the door, and he murdered them in cold blood, shooting both of them in the head, then he shot dead the policeman who tried to get to his colleagues and help them.   Two more police officers were wounded.

During the four-hour standoff, hundreds of shots were fired and neighbors hid in their basements until the suspect, 23-year-old Richard Poplawski, was taken into custody.  

His best friend was interviewed and said that Poplawski feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon."

Or how about Jerry and Joe Kane, the so-called sovereign citizens who died in a shootout with the police in Arkansas after killing two law enforcement officers? Yep...right wing, anti-government zealots.

Where is the left's James Cummings? He was the Maine man who was shot dead by his abused wife before he could make and detonate a dirty bomb. That was in January 2009 - he went over the edge as soon as Obama was elected, and set his plot in motion before he was even sworn in.  After his death, four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were removed from the residence, as well as the instructions to assemble a dirty bomb.

Or how about Byron Williams? Last month the paroled bank robber from northern California loaded up his mom's Toyota Tundra with guns he stole from her safe, donned body armour and headed for San Francisco where he intended to kill staffers at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU to "start a revolution" because he was sick of Congress shoving their "left wing agenda" down America's collective throat.  Where is our Byron Williams, Howard?

Or how about Timothy McVeigh? He murdered 168 people in cold blood because he hated the government as soon as a Democrat was elected. He said he was set off by Waco, but if that hadn't happened it would have been something else.

Where is the lefty who has done any of those things, Howard?

Don't bother looking, you fucking asshole. There isn't one. Not a one of them has a left-leaning counterpart. And so long as that remains the case, Kurtz and the rest of the Village Idiots will not merely remain part of the problem, they will be the arsonists pouring accellerant on an already raging fire.

A refresher course in How They Do It

Yesterday I was listening to Newsradio 880, one of the local all-news stations. This is the most listenable of the local news outlets, despite a penchant for celebrity "news" and a creeping wingnut leaning that surfaces all too often. "Kim Kommando", the booming-voiced tech "guru" was talking about how to find out if all those e-mails you've gotten about Barack Obama are true. It was a masterfully-crafted piece that managed to get just about every looney rumor and falsehood about Obama out there before talking about Snopes.com.

And that is how they do it: First they talk about the "liberal media." They they spout utter nonsense and lies, which are lapped up by that same "liberal media", desperate to prove it isn't "liberal." Then once it's out there into the ether, and into the echo chamber, they repeat it over and over and over again, even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary, until it takes on the patina of, well, truthiness:

Blogger Matt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

Recently, certain conservative intellectuals have begun to worry about whether this hasn't left the movement flying blind. "One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement," writes Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez, "is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted."

The movement, hell. It's making the whole country as dumb as a brontosaurus in a blizzard. Because reality eventually asserts itself.

But when it does, they'll come up with more nonsense to explain it. Probably something involving Hispanics, Muslims, or both.

Unfortunate choice of words, or Freudian slip?

For some reason, with hundreds of thousands of people losing their unemployment benefits here at home, and the second catastrophic earthquake in our hemisphere since the year started, the gasbags on This Weak With Some Idiot Or Another unsurprisingly felt that the most important thing to talk about was Desirée Rogers' resignation as White House Social Secretary. Be appalled at the utter blather and marvel about how these nimrods get paid to talk like this. But note in particular Sam Donaldson's choice of words towards the end:

VARGAS: And then, of course, this weekend, we have a brand-new White House social secretary appointed to replace Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Obamas who is exiting after a bumpy tenure, I would say. Cokie, you spoke with her. She -- she was highly criticized after the Obamas' first state dinner in which she arrived, looking absolutely gorgeous, but in what some people later said was far too fancy a dress, but most importantly, that was the state dinner that was crashed by the Salahis, who walked in without an invitation when the social secretary's office didn't have people manning the security sites.

ROBERTS: Well, I talked to -- I did talk to her, Desiree, yesterday at length. She is from my home city of New Orleans and fellow Sacred Heart girl.

DONALDSON: What's the name of the city? ROBERTS: New Orleans.

DONALDSON: I love to hear her say it.

(CROSSTALK)

ROBERTS: But -- and she has lots of good explanations about that dinner. And basically, the bottom line is, it's the Secret Service. But she -- but her -- her major point is -- and I -- and I completely take this -- is that she -- she put on 330 events at the White House last year and did open the building to all kinds of people who had not been there before. And they had wonderful music days of all kinds of music, where you had during the day, the musicians would work with kids in Washington and teach them things before coming on at night.

DONALDSON: Cokie, that's irrelevant.

ROBERTS: Well, I don't think it's irrelevant.

DONALDSON: I mean, it's irrelevant. People who work for the president understand or should understand their place, which is to be spear-carriers. There are two stars in anyone's White House, the president and the president's spouse. After that, this passion for anonymity that once was a hallmark of people who worked for a president, has been lost. She wanted to be a star herself...

ROBERTS: And it's been lost. Look at all the people who work for presidents and then go out and write books about them.

DONALDSON: I think you're right.

VARGAS: Do you think she was -- did she quit, or was she asked to leave?

DONALDSON: She was asked to.

ROBERTS: She says she quit.

DONALDSON: Oh, well...

Is it just me, or did Sam Donaldson call Desirée Rogers, who is black, a spear-chucker? Isn't the expression "water carriers"? Why did Donaldson think of "spears" in context of a black White House staffer and a black president?

(h/t)

Your Liberal Media at work

A quick flip through the morning gasbag shows found the following:

The Early Show, CBS. Its chosen "expert" today is Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Looneytunes), who on Sunday told Chris Wallace that it's legitimate to blame Barack Obama for the Christmas Day failed airliner attack.

The Today Show, NBC. Its chosen "expert" is Rep. Peter King (R-Idiocy), who said, and I quote: "All of the Islamic terrorists targeting us are Muslims."

I weep for our country.

Caturday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree DougJ over at Balloon Juice, commenting on how the Washington Villagers are once again having the vapors over someone who isn't part of their little club.

Money quote:

But what this article is really saying is that Desiree Rogers isn’t the right kind of person. That’s what Socksgate and Travelgate and all that other bullshit was about too—the Clintons weren’t the right kind of people. It’s what all the bullshit about Michelle Obama’s iPod and bare arms is about too.

I hate to go on and on about this, but it’s pretty remarkable that the media insisted the Clintons being investigated for using White House postage to send letters form from their cat and that the Obama White House be investigated because two weirdos crashed a White House party, but that the Bush White House should never be investigated for torture, politicizing the DOJ, falsifying intelligence, and (not that that I think this one is important but it is similar to the kinds of trivialities that are deemed important when they happen under Clinton or Obama) having a male prostitute show up to lob softball questions at White House briefings.

And now a random cat video that shows why cats rule the world. Now with bonus adorable puppies:

Except that Olbermann doesn't just pull stuff out of his ass and advocate murder

I couldn't believe this front-page article I read in the New York Times this morning, about how the corporate masters at Faux Noise and MSNBC told their warring on-air personalities, Billo the Clown (I can still call him that because I don't work for MSNBC) and Keith Olbermann to knock it off:

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

The only part of this feud that's regrettable is that it has resulted in lazy so-called "journalists" like Brian Stelter insisting that the two men are identical except that they come from different sides of the aisle.

Keith Olbermann is opinionated, he can be bombastic and pompous, and his intermittent Special Comments, for all that they are passionate and by their very nature as commentary, sometimes go over-the-top, he knows the difference between his opinion and facts; something Bill O'Reilly does not. In this video, O'Reilly tries to distance himself from his own responsibility in incitement to violence in the murder of Dr. George Tiller:

And you don't see Olbermann pull shit like this (perhaps because wingnuts are too cowardly to appear on his program):

Olbermann has a huge ego. So does O'Reilly. That happens with guys who are on TV and are good at what they do. The issue is not who's more bombastic. The question is who does reporting and commentary on actual facts, and who just pulls stuff out of his ass. And O'Reilly pulls stuff out of his ass.

But the issue isn't about keeping discourse civil, or which of these men is a putz and which is a saint. I probably wouldn't want to know either one of them. The issue is the extent to which corporate ownership controls the media message, and when we are now seeing signs of that same corporate media deciding that the presidency of Barack Obama must be destroyed barely six months into his term because corporate management prefers Republicans, then there is no meaning to democracy in this country.

Glenn Greenwald points out what we've already seen from corporate media, and also notes that Richard Wolffe, who did a reasonably credible job of reading from a teleprompter while subbing for Olbermann last week, is a corporate lobbyist at a company run by former Bush Administration spokesman Dan Bartlett:

So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC.  You don't have to agree with the reader's view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced.  Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive."  Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration.  MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government.  And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE.  The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.  Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government -- driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional.  GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.

* * * * * 

On a very related note:  this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was a guest-host on MSNBC's Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on vacation.  When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on Countdown, where he is called an "MSNBC political analyst" and comments on political news.  All of this, despite the fact that Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO.  According to the Press Release they issued to announce Wolffe's joining the company:

Don't let their allowing Rachel Maddow on the air fool you into thinking MSNBC is on our side. As much as I worship the ground she walks on, Maddow is for better or worse playing the same role in the Corporate States of America that the Democrats play in our political system: to give you the illusion that someone other than rich white guys in executive suites have any say whatsoever in American policy.

B@B (hearts) Charles Pierce

This exchange with David Shuster last night is awesome:

It must be hard to be David Shuster. On the one hand, this ex-Fox Newser (in fairness, so is Keith Olbermann) sees what's happening to his network, but on the other hand, he takes a mainstream media paycheck. So when Charles Pierce rightly excoriates the mainstream media for giving hatemongers like Liz Cheney a national forum in which to wink at the racist, hatemongering "birthers", Shuster feel obligated to defend his employers.

Scary Sotomayor and the World of the Tweety! ...or Media's Inability to Move Forward...

I try not to watch this crap anymore. The cable company here has done me a strangely backwards favor by taking away my ability to stream MSNBC or much of anything to my desktop besides dreaded network TV. So its odd these days that I'm catching Tweety when he's on as opposed to on YouTube or DVR when he's done something idiotic that is worth a couple of minutes of my time. This morning, in the here and now, I am reminded how much of a hack Tweety is, and I'm wondering how the panel manages to sit there, controlled by the "stories" of the week, as prescribed by the M$M talking points, and following the mundane surface doings of the new President, without screaming a la Howard Beale. Its all so predictable and boring, and maybe Tweety needs to consider that if he really wants those ratings that he needs, he might try to talk about the real stories and what they mean, if he's even capable of that.

So, if Obama is going to travel to Normandy to mark D-day, then we have to go over the foibles of other presidents who fell down stairs and offended one person or another; Bill Clinton looking through binoculars with the lens caps on, or worse, smoking a cigar in public after the Lewinsky scandal...wink, wink...And how will Obama fit into the meme that they are busily preparing for him? Its all so exciting that I can hardly wait! Of course, Obama spoils the fun time and again because he is so too slick.



Look, I know that even these political head brainy shows are a microcosm of the American psyche, and that there was never a NASCAR or Grand Prix fan who wasn't on the edge of their seat waiting for the crash. I know that we look for someone to trip and fall or, more recently, embarrass our country diplomatically, but I was sort of hoping that we were going to send President Obama out into the world to smooth over the impression of the ugly, stupid American that Bush spent eight years honing. It used to be that we waited for the hockey fight or Abbot and Costello to get lost in the haunted mansion as a way to get our ya-ya's out, but somewhere between Gerald Ford falling down the stairs of a plane, eliciting fond ribbing and Clinton's cigars, a huge helping of leader hatred was thrown in, and it has somehow become a sport to expect something any minute that is gonna stamp a presidency with a meme that will follow it into forever. So far the Obamas have avoided this, causing some strange sorta anger and shot in the dark labeling attempts; socialist, liar, not doing what he promised in the campaign...whatever...the reality is that things are so much better than they would have been with McCain, and though we should expect the best, lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater...or something like that.

The important question to ask yourself is what are these main stream talking points turning us away from; What are we missing here? I keep hearing that President Obama is not following his campaign promises exactly to the letter, but I'm not so sure that we want someone in that office who isn't able to adapt on the fly. I'm as worried as the next person, and I'm willing to fight for the more important issues, like Afghanistan and gay marriage, but I'm also acutely aware that in the big picture we need to look at who he has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the supreme court! Look at what is happening that is really going to shape trends in humanity in the next 100 or 200 years? What will our world be like with 2 or 3 new judges on our highest court that resemble the actual reality of the make up of America? This is huge! This is the kind of long term decision that along the way might grant the wishes of people who are so focused on a single issue that they are ready to jump ship immediately. Sheesh...Americans have no patience for sure, but this is ridiculous, and self destructive.



To spend so much time on one piece of a speech from eight years ago, indicates to me that they have nothing! Further, what Judge Sotomayor said is true! Is Limbaugh or Tweety or anyone else going to say with a straight face that Alito's rulings don't have something to do with his conservative, Italian, white upbringing? Isn't the point that a judges follow the rule of law, regardless of their backgrounds, but also bringing their background into their decisions that one interfere with the law? All indications are that she is a judge with a record of such decisions, and if this is all they can pull out, then we had better get ready for a different looking Supreme Court.... yay!...and in turn, we will see the kinds of changes that the people of this country want; not what special interests can conjure with swift boating and hysteria.

This is less an issue of what we Americans want, than a shaping of the story in a pathetic, grasping way by the disgruntled minority. Its unbelievable to me that the usual suspects still are giving a free platform to the usual suspects to say the same old crap. I know that the news guys miss Bush as much as the comedians do because there was so much to work with there, but maybe we'll have to get back to our favorite TV shows, America's Got Talent or whatever it is that allows us to make fun of each other, and extend again some respect where respect is due. Maybe along that way we can demand some focus on the fucking war(s) and how we are going to go forward!

If every public servant can be swift boated in this way (did I mention that this is extrapolated from one passage in a speech from eight years ago?) and if the story can be twisted and fed back to us as something that we somehow want to obsess about, then the inmates still have control of the asylum and maybe its time for a change of management at these networks, or at least some reregulation of media content in general.

Lets discuss Afghanistan and the torture issue. Lets discuss indictment of the criminals and what that would mean to us going forward. It occurs to me that the fear of Judge Sotomayor is more about the fact that she does have respect for the rule of law (for the people as opposed to bending and changing it in favor of large corporations.) The grasping by the right, and the insane racial comments tell me that they protesteth too much and that this may be someone who will fairly represent us regardless of who they're duck hunting with on the weekends.

If you want to contact the folks at NBC about their inane programming choices click here.

c/p RIP Coco

Lisa Mysers is back to her old tricks

Back in the Clinton years, Lisa Myers was the head warrior of the Nail Bill Clinton squad over at NBC. Now she focuses her attention only on the attacks by Republicans and conservative economists on the stimulus package:

After all, why present as well the majority of economists who favor stimulus of some kind, in many cases involving MORE spending than this bill has, when you can do the bidding of your corporate masters at General Electric? Of course focusing on wingnut objection to the package doesn't keep General Electric from seeking some taxpayer cash in search of government subsidies for the development of smart electricity meters. I applaud GE's efforts in the area of wind power and clean energy for the post-oil era, but it's a bit disingenuous for the company to send its lobbyists to Capitol Hill in search of subsidies while putting Lisa Myers on the network newscast that everyone sees (not just the political junkies who watch the station's MSNBC shows) to give the impression that all economists are opposed to the plan because they think it has too much spending and not enough tax cuts. This is the newscast that people watch over dinner in the evening, and to ONLY allow "conservative" economists airtime is to give the impression that the Obama Administration is barrelling ahead with policies opposed by the entire community of economic experts -- when in fact many if not most economists believe the package doesn't go far enough.

The fact is that we are in uncharted territory here, and no one knows if this stimulus package, or even a larger one, is going to actually work. What we do know is that the Bush Administration spent eight years cutting taxes and here we are. We have no idea if in fact our entire lifestyle over the last thirty years has been one big Ponzi scheme. But for Republicans, aided by a media that's only too happy to help restore them to power in 2010 so they can get their hands on Social Security and cut taxes even further on giant corporations like GE, what's a few million Americans thrown into poverty among friends? Especially if it means they may get to run the show in two years.

Bingo!!

At last, someone in the mainstream media recognizes what Republicans mean by "bipartisanship". Note how well Contessa Brewer duplicates the Republican whine:

On occasion, single-sentence blogging is all that's necessary

Like most bloggers on our side of the fence, I read Hullabaloo religiously. But honestly, some days Digby and Dday just make me want to blow my brains out. I'm down with the storm the Bastille housing the major networks, though. Just do it before Rachel comes in to work.

Didn't we learn anything from the Administration's lies about air quality at the WTC site after the 9/11 attacks?

I wonder if anyone in Tennessee actually believed this:

Officials at the Tennessee Valley Authority have said preliminary tests suggest there is no danger to millions of people who get their drinking water from the 652-mile Tennessee River.

According to TVA, there is no threat to the environment from Monday's breach at the coal-fired Kingston plant along the Emory River, which joins the Clinch River and flows into the main Tennessee River.

That was last Friday. By last night it was a different story:

Some water samples near a massive spill of coal ash in eastern Tennessee are showing high levels of arsenic, and state and federal officials on Monday cautioned residents who use private wells or springs to stop drinking the water.

Samples taken near the spill slightly exceed drinking water standards for toxic substances, and arsenic in one sample was higher than the maximum level allowed for drinking water, according to a news release from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the power plant where the spill occurred, the Environmental Protection Agency and other officials.

TVA spokesman Jim Allen said there are four private drinking water wells in the area affected by the spill and the agency should have tests from them this week.

"I think they were beyond the actual slide point of the material," EPA spokeswoman Laura Niles said of the wells. "There shouldn't be direct impact, but that's why they are sampling."

Arsenic occurs naturally in the environment, but elevated levels can cause ailments ranging from nausea to partial paralysis, and long-term exposure has been linked to several types of cancer, according to the EPA.

TVA's environmental executive Anda Ray said the arsenic levels were high because of the type of measurement that the EPA used, which included soil mixed in with water.

"Those samples were not dissolved arsenic," Ray said. "The dissolved arsenic, which is what you look at for drinking water samples, are undetectable in all the cases. The elevated arsenic that the EPA is referring to is the data that we collected when it was stirred up. It is routinely filtered out through all water treatment plants."

Authorities have said the municipal water supply is safe to drink.

The warning came a week after a retention pond burst at the Kingston Steam Plant, spreading more than a billion gallons of fly ash mixed with water over roughly 300 acres of Roane County and into a river. The deluge destroyed three homes and damaged 42 parcels of land, but there were no serious injuries.

However, environmental concerns could grow when the sludge containing the fly ash, a fine powdery material, dries out. The federal Environmental Protection agency and the TVA have begun air monitoring and on Monday advised people to avoid activities that could stir up dust, such as children or pets playing outside.

The dust can contain metals, including arsenic, that irritate the skin and can aggravate pre-existing condition such as asthma, Niles said.

But it's perfectly safe, right? Just the way the air around Ground Zero was safe and now we have a rash of cases of people who worked and live in that area with serious respiratory problems.

It's amazing that this story hasn't gotten more press than it has. I realize that the latest Israel/Palestinian fracas takes up a fair amount of ink, as does the continuing media case of Blagomania. But with this coal ash spill being at least as big an environmental catastrophe as the Exxon Valdez spill, you'd think it would get more press.

This is what the EPA is still telling people is safe for them to have in their drinking water and their backyards:

In a single year, a coal-fired electric plant deposited more than 2.2 million pounds of toxic materials in a holding pond that failed last week, flooding 300 acres in East Tennessee, according to a 2007 inventory filed with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The inventory, disclosed by the Tennessee Valley Authority on Monday at the request of The New York Times, showed that in just one year, the plant’s byproducts included 45,000 pounds of arsenic, 49,000 pounds of lead, 1.4 million pounds of barium, 91,000 pounds of chromium and 140,000 pounds of manganese. Those metals can cause cancer, liver damage and neurological complications, among other health problems.

And the holding pond, at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a T.V.A. plant 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained many decades’ worth of these deposits.

Amy Gahran wrote last week on the media's near-blackout of the story, noting in particular how CNN has cut its entire science, environment, and technology news team. I guess the increase in religion-themed programming we've seen on CNN in recent years is a sign of that network's enthusiastic embrace of the new Middle Ages towards which we're headed. Or perhaps it's simply a question of not wanting to acknowledge that not even Barack Obama can change the fact that there is no such thing as clean coal.

Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: WaPo's Eugene Robinson, of all people -- that wryly smiling fixture on MSNBC who specializes in benevolent bemusement at the follies of Washington in the Bush years. Yesterday, Robinson opined that the Republican Party needs a good long stretch in the wilderness.

Money quote:

an any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?

It's pathetic to hear right-wing talk radio blowhards try to associate Barack Obama with "radical" or "socialist" views when a Republican administration is tossing aside "Atlas Shrugged" and speed-reading "Das Kapital."