A snipped from an interview eith Seymour Hersh:
…for Hersh this will be a starting gun. ‘You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president’s inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:] ‘You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.’ So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.’
(emphasis mine)
I am trembling like a school girl.
OK, the full throated condemnation of McCain’s call to fire Cox from the SEC, which calls him “Un-Presidential”, is not something I would have expected from the wingnuttiest OP/ED page in the nation.
Will Bunch has an interesting observation regarding the press, that they are almost completely divorced from life around them.
He was reading an account of Len Downie upon his retirement from the Washington Post, and he noted that Downie said that he did not have any friends outside of the paper. Note also that Downie also did not register to vote until he retired.
So Bunch asks the question, “If Len Downie only hung around with other journalists, where did he get his ideas for what was news?”
The answer is, of course, PR flacks, because he has no context to make these decisions on his own.
Basically, he is calling the political reporters a bunch of wankers:
As Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” descends on Denver for four days of coverage, Jon Stewart took after the “established” media for getting too cozy with candidates and regurgitating campaign spin when it comes to political coverage.
In a breakfast with reporters, Stewart directed most of his ire at the 24-hour cable news networks, which he called “gerbil wheels,” and said the media at-large had “abdicated” to what he called the “slow-witted beast.”
He said the never-ending television news cycle creates a “false sense of urgency” and forces reporters to “follow the veins that have been mined,” instead of pursuing serious and in-depth reporting.
Seriously, I get to a point where I can’t take it any more, and use the mute button too much, and then I can’t stand their faces, and I change the channel watch Alton Brown on Food Network, and check in with the blogs.
Yesterday, I did keep checking in because I felt that Kennedy deserved the eyeballs, but during political coverage, even Maddow and Olbermann get on my nerves, because they spend so much time repeating themselves.
You know that the current IP regime, and the drooling morons at the USPTO have jumped the proverbial shark.
The first reform that should be made is to treat patents like civil rights lawsuit, in that you can challenge a law as a violation of civil rights before anyone is charged, because of the chilling effects on society.
I’m stunned. This time, when Jerome Corsi comes out with a book, the press is noting that his book is unsupported by the facts, and that Corsi is a bigoted cook kook.
As writer Greg Mitchell notes, even Nedra Pickler is saying that the emperor has no clothes.
It appears that some of the people that he interviewed on the record about forgeries concocted by Bush and His Evil Minions™ regarding Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda are getting a lot of pressure to recant, so Ron Suskind will release the raw transcripts of the interviews.
Can we Chimpeach now, please?
In this case, Paul La Monica, who always seems to find a silver lining, no matter how bogus, is now saying that he expects losses in the financial industry to exceed $1 trillion. He even quotes noted bear Nouriel Roubini.
It would appear that the financial journalists are starting to notice reality chewing on their tuchas.
The IOC just meekly assented to allowing the Chinese government to filter internet access for the reporters at the games, despite promising otherwise just weeks ago.
What a bunch of losers.
That being said, ShaMao’er asks the question that immediately comes to mind, “The same old question… why are they so dumb?”
Meaning the Chinese government. They had to know that this would be found out in short order, and they had to know that the consequences of being found out would be worse than anything that a reporter pulled off Amnesty International’s web site.
My only guess is that is about a need to be in control trumped their need to get good foreign press.
A number of analyses have suggested that the primary audience that is being targeted by the PRC for the Olympics is internal, not external, and that would explain this action.
Time’s Karen Timulty, “So how many more times are the McCain campaign and the Republicans going to repeat what is a thoroughly baseless charge?” (emphasis mine)
The front page of the Washington Post, “For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.” (emphasis mine)
And the New York Times Editorial Board, “Many voters are wondering whether a McCain presidency would be an extension of Mr. Bush’s two disastrous terms. If the way Mr. McCain is running his campaign these days is an indication, Americans don’t have to wait until next January for the answer to that one.” (emphasis mine)
Could it be that the “Straight Talk Express” has worn out the batteries? Because this stuff looks suspiciously like journalism.
John McCain has argued that Barack Obama has not attended enough hearings on Afghanistan. Well, ABC News’ Z. Byron Wolf burnt a very small amount of shoe leather, and determined that McCain has attended no hearing on at all on Afghanistan in the past two years, though McCain is apparently asking for a get out of jail free card on this because, “McCain’s years of previous foreign policy experience make up for his recent lack of attendance at hearing.”
It’s amazing that the McCain loving press is actually mentioning that he’s criticizing Obama for things he’s done worse.
Really, REALLY weak.
The logic was circuitous, and and the fire was just not there.
I believe that Charlie Pierce was right when he worried that Keith may be wearing out the batteries on hiss special comments.
While I think that it was accurate, it was just a realistic listing of what was going on politically, without any of the fire that you normally get.
on edit:
You can get a clip and a transcript of the special comment at Crooks and Liars. Interestingly enough, unlike most of his special comments, it reads better than it shows.
Yep, we have Rupert Mordoch’s New York Post going front page on an article about CPS reporter Lara Logan having an affair in Baghdad.
Imagine that, a war correspondent in theater having an affair.
In any case, I agree with Will Bunch. Lara Logan is being smeared for her criticism of Iraq war coverage, which she has been highly critical of.
This started when she said on the Daily Show, that, “If I were to watch the news that you’re hearing in the United States, I’d just blow my brains out. ‘Cause it would drive me nuts.”
John McCain’s hometown paper, The Arizona Republic, has been covering John McCain longer than any other paper, and as a result they do some journalism, and reveal that McCain’s as a maverick is not born out by his votes in the Senate, at least not the ones where his votes matters.
When the votes are close, he votes Republican….if he manages to show up at all.
Stephen Trimble, who has a lot more patience than I do, notices a solicitiation document for bids to integrate the GBU-57 into the B-2.
He does some research, and all he can find is a reference to it being a 5000lb penetrating bomb from an article in the Grauniad* circa 2003, but this appears to be an error actually referring to the GBU-28.
So, why is the USAF putting out bids to integrate a new weapon into the B-2? Why does it appear to be a penetrator?
Is this a preparation for a first strike on Iran?
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
Still impressed with the delivery and the sincerity, but he should not have referenced Orlando Patterson’s unhinged, and quite frankly bigoted screed, he clearly complains that some of the children “appear Latino” on the stock footage, in which he finds a the ad analogous to “Birth of a Nation”.
His comment was intense, well delivered, and sincere, it was, however, in this specific instance, which was less than 1/5 of this special comment, was wrong.
Ummmm…wow…..
It should be up at Crooks and Liars in the next few hours if you have not seen it.
Amazing, plaintive.
Just watch it.
Two hedge funds have increased their stake in the NY Times company to 19%, and they are agitating for 4 of the 13 seats on the board of directors. (The other 9 seats are controlled by the Sulzberger family by virtue of the two tiered stock structure).
I think that this is the first stage of an assault on the two tiered stock structure.
The strategy of the hedge funds could fall into one of three categories:
I think that the last one is least likely.
We have an interesting comment on the John McCain coverage at the NY Times from Molly Gordy on TPM Cafe.
She notes that Marilyn Thompson, one of the authors of the, quit the Times and returned to the WaPo, about a month ago. Ms. Gordy wonders if she did so because she felt that the story had been unfairly spiked.
For reasons that have never been clear to me, the press is seriously in the can for McCain, and they may have suppressed, or watered down, the story.