Excuse me, but it turned violent when police shot Scott Olsen in the head

Actual headline from today's New York times online:



That's the spin from the so-called liberal media.

Here's what's actually going on:

News Blackout

A few dozen people put on costumes and show up at politicians' Town Hall meetings and the media decide it's a mass movement.

Over 60,000 people demonstrate against Wall Street in New York City, and it's completely ignored.



Maybe it's because our demonstrations have a sense of fun and goofiness and we don't talk about guns and killing people who don't agree.

How we know that Rick Perry's ascension to the presidency has already been decided

We knew that the media were already in love with Rick Perry. Even though we've already had a theocratic moron from Texas with a full head of hair and a glad-handing manner and cowboy boots in the White House, one who took control of a country with a surplus from eight years of peace and prosperity and wrecked it with tax cuts and wars that go nowhere, the men of the media loves them some good hair and cowboy boots. And it wouldn't matter if Barack Obama were somehow able to get unemployment down to 4% in the next fourteen months, these guys want them some cowboy and they're going to get it.



Bear witness:

Let's repeat David Gregory about four minutes in, shall we?

You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that's extreme. Well people on the other side think that introducing health care reform for the whole country is akin to European

And there you have what passes for punditry: Talking about the possibility of secession is EXACTLY THE SAME as thinking that people who are poor should have the same right to health care as the rich do.



Coming next: Rick Perry's saying that there's nothing we can do to fix things other than to just pray to Jesus is the very definition of strong leadership.



There's nothing to do with David Gregory except throw our hands up in the sky, say "Hasa diga eebowai", and link to some Driftglass Photochoppin' here and here.

Krugman is getting in touch with his inner Keith Olbermann

Paul Krugman has been pretty shrill about the debacle that's taken place in Washington since a black Democrat became president and the right wing had a collective nervous breakdown. But today he fills in for David Brooks by taking a well aimed swipe at...well....David Brooks (and others of Bobo's ilk) in a column called "The Centrist Cop-Out" (NYT link):

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

[snip]

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

[snip]

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Snap!

And there you have it -- Krugman at his best, taking off the gloves against his own absent colleague. So should we now watch for Paul Krugman to be fired from the New York Times and replaced by, say, Erick Erickson? You know, for balance and all.

Shit.

Comcast got the OK to buy NBC on Wednesday.

Keith Olbermann got the boot today. This disgusting piece of shit rants on:

Citizens United is the worst thing to ever happen to this country, and yes I am including Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in that consideration. Yes, more people died in those events. But freedom and democracy itself died the day the Roberts court decided that corporations should be able to buy government and control the public airwaves utterly.

If you have Comcast, AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, you might consider speaking to these fuckers in the only language they understand, and cancel your subscription. I've had Dish Network for over a decade. Yes, it costs me a bit more, and I have no triple threat or triple trouble or any of the other packages the giant behemoths who control the information flow are putting out. I also often have coupons. If you want more information, contact me. Dish Network also carries FSTV, where you can see Democracy Now and Thom Hartmann's new show. You won't find that on Comcast.

UPDATE: You can thank Keith Olbermann for speaking truth to power for the last eight years here.

When Ruth Marcus is your idea of "the liberal commentariat", you're living in the DC bubble

Every time I bring myself to read Ross Douthat in the New York Times, I wonder how someone so mind-bogglingly stupid can possibly even dress himself in the morning. Here he is today, opining about how the ENTIRE "liberal commentariat" is defending the Obama Administration's expansion of x-ray scanners at airports:

Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travelers choose between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a private security massage. Democrats would have been outraged at yet another Bush-era assault on civil liberties. Liberal pundits would have outdone one another comparing the T.S.A. to this or that police state. (“In an outrage worthy of Enver Hoxha’s Albania ...”) And Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration’s defense, while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.

But Barack Obama is our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the T.S.A., and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception; mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse. It was the populist right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal commentariat that leaped to their defense.

This role reversal is a case study in the awesome power of the partisan mindset. Up to a point, American politics reflects abiding philosophical divisions. But people who follow politics closely — whether voters, activists or pundits — are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be doing. Our ideological convictions may be real enough, but our deepest conviction is often that the other guys can’t be trusted.

The online version of this piece links to a Ruth Marcus column in the Washington Post.

Ruth Marcus? THIS is Douthat's idea of the "liberal commentariat"? A WaPo hack of a quarter-century's duration? Does anyone even READ Ruth Marcus, let alone take her seriously?

Forget about little blogs like this one, which have been all over this TSA nonsense like flies on horseshit. What are the Big Boiz doing? Yes, Josh Marshall seems far more willing to give the Obama Administration and the entire process the benefit of the doubt than I am. But Digby has been noting the absurdity of it all. HuffPo has had a slew of articles which can hardly be said to defending the TSA. Over at the Great Orange Satan, there's hardly a rush to defend the Obama Administration. The Big Blue Smurf, as is his wont, has his customary series of one-sentence posts, mostly about nonsense, but since this is nothing new for him, it hardly qualifies as a defense of, or even silence about, Obama's TSA.

Here's JUST ONE of the many segments Keith Olbermann has done on the subject:

Rachel Maddow, understandably, is focusing on DADT. But Chris Hayes, subbing on the 22nd, talked about the whole TSA foofarah, and while hardly defending the Obama administration, did point out that a certain amount of the TSA-outrage pot is being stirred by libertarian activists (including John Tyner, the "Don't touch my junk" guy) and others who are exploiting the whole mess to advocate for privatizing the TSA -- as if that would make a difference. But this is hardly a defense of the proliferation of scanning and pat-downs:

Karoli over at Crooks and Liars cites a much-publicized (and much maligned in the progressive blogosphere, which shows that we are far more willing to criticize our own than the right is) article in The Nation which pointed out Tyner's role as a libertarian activist and accused him of being a shill for the Koch brothers. The C&L piece cites other commentary on the Nation article, commentary which blasted it as a smear -- which it is.

What NO ONE on the left is doing is defending the use of x-ray equipment and genital-groping as a means of "keeping us safe" -- not even Ruth Marcus, who seems to feel that this system may be crap but it's all we've got. This is far more skepticism than we ever got from the right, which marched in lockstep to the notion that "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" in the context of the Bush Adminstration's appalling record on Constitutional protections.

And this is the difference between the so-called "liberal commentariat" -- at least the commentariat you get if you stick your nose outside the beltway. On the left, we are having a conversation among many minds. On the right, we get only one theme: Republican Good. Obama Bad.

Your Liberal Media

Here in northern NJ, the newspaper of record is named, appropriately, The Record. This paper takes a fair amount of heat from the Usual Suspect for its "liberal bias", which translates to "not marching in lockstep with Republicans."

My part of Bergen County falls into New Jersey's fifth Congressional district. This district sits like a hat on top of New Jersey, encompassing the bedroom communities of Outer Whitelandia, and the more rural parts of Sussex and Warren Counties, or as those parts are known in some circles, "out where they marry their sisters."

The Fifth District was represented in the House for 25 years by Marge Roukema, an Olympia Snowe-type moderate Republican, more-or-less fiscally conservative but with a laissez-faire attitude towards social. You know, the kind that the Tea Partiers are trying to expunge from the party. In 2002, after running against Roukema twice in the Republican primary and coming dangerously close in 2000, Garrett finally won the seat after Roukema retired. Garrett is a Trojan Horse of a Congressman, making regular use of his franking privileges to send campaign-style letters to his constituents while consistently voting against programs that would help his district. To Scott Garrett, ideology trumps all.

A series of progressively weaker candidates has run against Garrett each year -- weak because the troubled Bergen County Democratic Organization, which has yet to recover from decades of corrupt leadership, refuses to put any skin in the game. The national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee refuses to even acknowledge that the district exists. So every two years, we're left with someone no one has ever heard of, trying to win a Congressional seat with five figures worth of cash and a small army of mostly college-age volunteers.

This year The Record endorsed the Democratic candidate, Tod Theise -- a Republican-turned-Democrat from Warren County, who seemed OK except for a troubling tendency to talk about how his faith informs his decision=making. Theise had even less money than other candidates, and the newspaper's endorsement didn't buy him uch.

Three weeks before the general election, after endorsing Garrett's opponent, the paper delivered on its front page a journalistic blowjob to Scott Garrett, titled "GOP Outsider finally in vogue". Yes, that old Scott Garrett -- ahead of his time.

Today, almost two weeks AFTER the election, the paper's Washington correspondent, who wrote the puff piece before the election, pens a front-page story that might have been helpful for voters to have BEFORE the election about Garrett's questionable campaign finance relationship with a large hedge fund in Georgia:

Twelve donors tied to one of the nation’s biggest hedge funds contributed more than $150,000 to a political committee in Georgia controlled by Rep. Scott Garrett, the North Jersey Republican likely to have increased power over financial regulations next year.

The Scott Garrett Victory Committee was created in July and registered in Athens, Ga. In August and September, the donations came in from employees, or spouses of employees, of Elliot Management Corp., manager of a $17 billion hedge fund that specializes in distressed debt.

Two of the donors gave more than $35,000 each. That’s far above the limit of $2,400 per election that individuals could give to candidates, but the contributions were legal because the Garrett committee was a joint entity with several other political action committees, including the National Republican Congressional Committee, which has much higher limits.

Garrett transferred less than $10,000 of those contributions to the campaign fund for his own reelection race, which he won with 65 percent of the vote on Nov. 2. Nearly all of the rest — 83 percent of the money raised — went to the NRCC to maintain or expand Garrett’s influence with fellow House members, or to Republican candidates and committees in Garrett’s district and around New Jersey.

When a Democrat does this, it's called "bribery" or "influence-peddling." When a Republican does it, everyone looks the other way. Yes, I wrote to the paper about it. We'll see if they publish it this time.

When almost a third of your audience signs a petition in two days, what else can you do but blink?

And that's exactly what MSNBC's Chief Scumbag, Phil Griffin, did today:

07 Nov 2010 8:51 PM
STATEMENT REGARDING KEITH OLBERMANN - SUNDAY, NOV. 7

From Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC:

After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night's program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy. We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night.

Oh, I'm sure he deliberated. Right here.

I guess Phil Griffin wants to replace him with Christine O'Donnell

That didn't take long.

Phil Griffin, who heads up MSNBC, has suspended Keith Olbermann indefinitely without pay for donating his own money to political candidates.

As Kos points out, Pat Buchanan donated money to Republicans between 2005 and 2008 (not to mention what a virulent hatemonger he is) and he's still on Morning Schmoe on a regular basis.

This morning Meredith Viera had a cuddle with Christine O'Donnell, who in case anyone forgot, LOST her election bid on Tuesday, but is somehow still a more valuable commodity on television than the guy who actually WON.

I can add 2 + 2, can you?

Meanwhile, Faux Noise doesn't seem to care about its on-air talent advocating for candidates on their own time with their own money. Here's a list of Sean Hannity's donations.

UPDATE: I'm shocked, I tell you...shocked...SHOCKED...and APPALLED...that Joey the Intern Killer Scarborough donates to Republicans -- but Phil Griffin has no problem with that.

UPDATE #2: Greg Sargent calls bullshit.