Many years ago, when Allegheny Airlines, aka Agony Airlines, announced it’s name change to USAir, the name “Useless Air” was coined at the press conference announcing the new name.
Well, Apple just announced a new iPod in pink, and journalist John Paczkowski in a flash of genius, has named it iPod Pepto.
Bummer of a birth mark, Hal.
Would that this would happen.
Some reporters should drop out of the campaign
By Martin Schram –
Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, January 13, 2008The verdicts of Iowa and New Hampshire prompted a handful of the 2008 political players to depart from the presidential campaign trail.
But far too many remain for our own good.
Along with the handful of presidential candidates who dropped out so far, voters might be better served if a hundred or so of my political-reporter and pundit colleagues dropped out as well – and were replaced by journalists whose beats are about national security, economics, environment and health care.
For our coverage has not been serving the public interest by providing the sort of information voters really need to know – especially in the last weeks when many voters make their decisions.
I would add something more significant. That among top tier political reporters, not only is there a lack of understanding about the political issues of the day, there is actually an active disdain for knowing these issues.
It’s all about the game, not what it means to win or lose.
The coverage is cynical and juvenile.
Last night Olbermann brought on Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss issues with regard to Nevada, and the Obama’s whole “I loveReagan” crap.
What he was unaware of was the fact that Lawrence O’Donnell wrote a truly stupid article on HuffPo a few days earlier titled “John Edwards is a Loser.
His thesis was that John Edwards should get out of the race, because he was in Obama’s way, and because Obama was black, it was borderline racist for him to run against him and strengthen Hillary.
The article was stupid for the following reasons:
Well, a number of folks (not me) took the time to drop a line (hopefully a polite one) on Olbermann, and he responded on Daily Kos about 18 hours later.
He did the unthinkable, he apologized, and he says that he will be addressing it tonight.
Lawrence O’Donnell Hotlist
by Keith Olbermann [Subscribe]
Fri Jan 18, 2008 at 02:00:01 PM ESTForgive the fairly minor focus here but I spot at least three diaries on his appearance on Countdown last night to discuss Obama, Reagan, and Edwards.
Those of you complaining about it are right.
His HuffPo piece was news to me.
Shouldn’t have been, obviously, but it was.
I don’t read every blog, nor everything written by my guests. I often don’t know until an hour beforehand who will be a guest on a given show (if it matters to you, these scheduling nightmares tend to come in waves for some reason, and last night was a Nor’easter). Also, to announce, on-air, each guest’s preferences, prejudices, shillings and shiv jobs, would reduce the rest of the show to “Good Evening. Call Me Ishmael. My Boat Sank. The End. Good Night.” And Lawrence O’Donnell’s insight is almost always perceptive, relevant, and enlightened.
But even with these caveats, the point about this appearance, especially in the wake of such a freshly-written piece, is well-taken and I’m very sorry.
It will be addressed tonight on the show.
Thanks.
Damn good work.
The Nation has a very interesting article, Citigroup: Too Big to Fail?, which goes a long way towards seeing how the deregulatory attitudes of the past 31 years (yes, it started with Carter) have led to our current mess.
Citibank is the poster child for this problem, though the bank has a very long history of being on the wrong side of collapses (they were deep in Mexico and Asia when both needed bailouts).
First, let’s look at the Glass-Steagall act of 1933. It was a New Deal law, which was enacted in response to abuses preceding the Great Depression, where bankers were pushing depositors to invest in dubious stocks that they were also being paid by the company to sell.
Basically, it made it illegal for a commercial bank to operate as an investment bank, and vise verse, because there are too many conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds“.
Bill Clinton delivered his “New Democrat” party, accompanied by lots of happy talk about magic words like “synergy” and how “modernization” would create a more stable (and profitable) financial system. It did the latter, for sure, but not the former.
Actually, the combination of insurance, investment banking and old-line commercial banks multiplied the conflicts of interest within banks, despite so-called “firewalls” supposed to keep these activities separate. Much like Enron, placing some deals in off-balance sheet entities did not insulate Citigroup from the losses in its swollen subprime housing lending. The bank has so far written off something like $15 billion and more to come.
The problem is, of course, that Citi is so large that the consequences of its failure would be disastrous to the markets. It would make the collapse of LTCM, which reaqired a Fed orchestrated (Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan) bailout look like the failure of the corner 7-11.
Over the past few years it has appeared that the every single rollback of Depression Era regulations has been a mistake.
Seriously, when the Las Vegas Review Journal gave this endorsement, they knifed Obama and Clinton. They describe him as “hardly” the ideal candidate fro president, but preferable to, “Bill Clinton invited onto a This is Your Life talk show where they’re joined by Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky.”
So, “Obama is, at least, likeable”, and Hillary is “re-run of the horror movie “It Came From Little Rock,” with the sound turned up much too loud.”
The only substantive comment that they make is that, “John Edwards’ anti-capitalist populism is not in this country’s long-term best interests.”
Like Anglo-Saxon hyper capitalism has led to rising living standards.
It’s wankeriffic, but at least it’s well written wanking. It made me laugh.
I cannot excerpt The 10 Commandments of Punditry and do it justice, so just go and read it.
Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times has a hysterical essay on the thrill of the trappings of power. Read it, but don’t drink anything, you’ll have to clean your screen.
A sample:
“If you fly into Camp David on a helicopter,” he assured me, “it’s instant arousal. But if you have to go to a European summit in Brussels, its so depressing you’re impotent for a week.”
ROTFLMAO
Timothy Egan of the Times has a very interesting post about the establishment’s antipathy towards Huckabee. It sounds a lot like their rap on Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar) and Jimmy Carter (59th out of 820 at Annapolis) too.
Amazing it appears that the Washington Hive Mind™ is Republican, and that it hates authentic Southerners (GW Bush was born in Connecticut, and went to Phillips Andover and Yale).
The rap against Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher and ex-Arkansas governor now doing for the Republican Party establishment what three-alarm chili does for an afternoon nap, is that he’s too inexperienced to be president, too naïve — a rube straight out of Dogpatch.
Few of Huckabee’s critics have actually come out and said what many of them think. The language is coded, as it usually is with class and race in this country. The Wall Street Journal, the anti-tax jihadists at the Club For Growth, the National Review – these pillars of Old School Republicanism have signaled that Huckabee is Not One of Ours. But they’re careful to say it’s not about class, because, of course – it is!
Go Read the rest.
Many critics of the Bush Administration have been accused of shrillness.
Obviously I disagree, though some of my readers, particularly the more recent ones, may disagree.
That being said, this New York Times editorial on the death John C. Breckinridge (it was an error, and about 10 years premature) dated 7 December 1863 makes us all sound like Timothy Leary.
Lambert of Corrente makes the point that Barack Obama’s speeches on reconciliation are dangerously naive, and I’d tend to agree.
He makes the point that much of the “flying wing-nut monkey” aspects of American conservatism have been the result of very people, primarily those got their money from dead ancestors as opposed to working for a living, have had a direct economic interest in the “flying wing-nut monkey” policies. It’s more than ideology, it is a deliberate and effective accumulation of both additional wealth and power.
If he is right, and my recent dust-up with the readers of The National Review over a comment about a writing gig for Ramesh Ponnuru*, whose career has largely been bankrolled by these interests, is evidence of the nature of the structures put in place by wealthy heirs for their own benefit.
To quote Lambert, who also got a nod from Krugman:
For these billionaires, the ROI of the Conservative Movement is absolutely spectacular. At the micro level, for example, if you want to create an aristocracy, then you want to eliminate any taxes on inherited wealth, despite what Warren Buffet or Bill Gates might say about the values entailed by that project. So, the Conservative Movement goes to work, develops and successfully propagates the term “death tax” — which they may even believe in, as if sincerity were the point — and voila! Whoever thought that “family values” would translate to “feudal values” and dynastic wealth? At the macro level, their ROI has been spectacular as well. Real wages have been flat for a generation; unions have been disempowered; the powers of corporations greatly increased; government has become an agent for the corporations, rather than a protector of the people; the safety net has been shredded; and so on and on and on.
Ponnuru is where he is because the right wing infrastructure recognizes him as an asset that offers a very good return on investment.‡
What the supporters of Obama maintain, at least the ones that I deal with in my Pinko Commie circles, is that this is largely a campaign tactic, and that he recognizes it as the reality of the situation, or to quote “Amadan” a poster on the (by invitation only) Stellar Parthenon BBS,
But let’s face it, Obama has to dance around in a tutu and fairy wings or he goes from “friendly magical Negro who just might be electable” to “Angry Scary Black Man.
Personally, I’m not inclined to believe this. Even if was the intent, behavior becomes internalized through habit. Eventually, you become what you are pretending to be.
*No, I’m not picking a fight, or implying a lack of intellect, but according to the NRO’s bio of him, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton’s history department, Wiki says with a BA degree.
The BA is not the professional degree in History, the PhD. is, hence the jokes about history majors delivering pizzas, so normally the career path would involve an MA, JD (law degree), or PhD in something more specific.
As a result of his work on The Sentinel, a now-defunct conservative campus magazine at Princeton† and other venues, he was recognized, and recruited, as a writer/editor/fellow at various right wing institutions.
†I love “the Google” as a research tool.
‡I actually mean this as a compliment. Seriously.
The Lives They Lived – Steven Gilliard Jr.
My thought is that it’s nice that they are recognizing him. Jesse Wendel of the GNB writes some more that you should read.
I knew Steve primarily through his work, the folks at GNB knew him period.
We all miss him.
Whatever you do, don’t have anything in your mouth before reading this magnificently illustrated tome.
You will have to clean the screen.
In his blog post, Memories of 2003, the great Paul Krugman notes:
Back in 2003 all the Kewl Kids, as a lot of my friends call them,
FWIW, I call them “very serious people”.
thought that to suggest that Bush was misleading us into war was, you know, shrill — it marked you as not being a Serious Person.
And here’s the thing: they still do. Even now, it’s better for your reputation not to have noticed until, say, 2005 that we had some dangerous people running the country. If you noticed earlier — or, worse yet, you caught on to the administration’s essential mendacity right from the beginning — it’s not a sign that maybe you had good judgment. It shows that you were an irrational Bush hater.
This is kind of like the term “Prematurely anti-fascist” that was big in the 1950s.
How can one be prematurely anti-fascist??? That’s kind of like being prematurely anti-baby eating.
It was a way of dismissing people’s ideas without any serious review.
It’s why the Democratic party should extricate from groups of “very serious people” like the Council on Foreign Relations.
Glenn Greenwald nails it again:
What a stupid and vapid woman this is, but respected and admired by our media class because she fits right in with them — endlessly impressed by her own sophistication, maturity and insight while drooling out platitudes one never hears except in seventh-grade cafeterias and on our political talk shows. As always, this isn’t worth noting because the adolescent stupidity on display here is unique to Noonan, but precisely because it isn’t. This is how our national elections are decided: by people like her, spewing things like this.
The late Steve Gilliard did a marvelous 37 part series on the history of colonial wars. Boor at Daily Kos has put together an index of his series.
It is invaluable reading if you want to understand the problems inherent in empire.
The Financial Times has an absolutely snarkalicious review of John Bolton’s book, Surrender is Not an Option.
A quick sample:
….
A lack of intellectual curiosity might not matter if Bolton were a gifted storyteller, or interestingly introspective. But that is not the case. If he has ever had difficult personal or moral choices to make, he is not letting on. At one point, he does acknowledge that he took steps to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. He writes: “I made the cold calculation that I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle,” adding: “Looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation.” The whole episode is dealt with in a paragraph.
Many people of Bolton’s generation made similar decisions. But it would be interesting to hear a little more on this subject, from a man who has given his book the bellicose title Surrender is Not an Option. When it came to Vietnam, surrender was not an option for Bolton because he never got close enough to the enemy to make it feasible.
….
(emphasis mine)
Go read it.
Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”
After Paul Krugman made some relatively mild, and completely accurate criticisms of Obama’s health plan, the Obama campaign decided to go with some remarkably bogus oppo research where they selectively quoted, and misquoted Krugman.
Stupid move, but typical of a candidate who has never had a serious electoral challenge from a Democrat.
So, now the most popular, and most widely read liberal commentator in the United States has decided to go further, and criticise the most basic theory of Barack Obama’s campaign, his call for an “end to partisanship”.
It’s no one’s fault but Obama’s. He took a mild difference in policy, and
This shows just how unprepared Obama is for the big time.
Mr. Edwards replied, “Some people argue that we’re going to sit at a table with these people and they’re going to voluntarily give their power away. I think it is a complete fantasy; it will never happen.”
This was pretty clearly a swipe at Mr. Obama, who has repeatedly said that health reform should be negotiated at a “big table” that would include insurance companies and drug companies.
On Saturday Mr. Obama responded, this time criticizing Mr. Edwards by name. He declared that “We want to reduce the power of drug companies and insurance companies and so forth, but the notion that they will have no say-so at all in anything is just not realistic.”
Hmm. Do Obama supporters who celebrate his hoped-for ability to bring us together realize that “us” includes the insurance and drug lobbies?
It gets better. Go read it.
Too good not to quote, and too short not to quote in its entirety, from the pen of Atrios“
Shorter Candidates
Obama: The system sucks, but I’m so awesome that it’ll melt away before me.
Edwards: The system sucks, and we’re gonna have to fight like hell to destroy it.
Clinton: The system sucks, and I know how to work within it more than anyone.
ROTFLMAO!
Once again, Paul Krugman demonstrates why the New York Times pays him to write.
He clearly and concisely describes why the current problem is insolvency, and not illiquidity.
He then goes on to explain just why the Fed really cannot fix this. If you have a run on a sound bank, an quick loan to infuse of cash works, because it gives everyone time to get their heads screwed on straight again, but if a bank is busted, a loan, no matter how large cannot help.
Basically, it means that the Fed, which after all only loans money, and sets up rules for short term loans, cannot help.
Go read his article.
The last line, which is a note from the editor, that “David Brooks is off today,” is also a bit of an unintentional hoot.
David Brooks is a bit off every day.