Category: Media

Why Do Right Wingers Hate America

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Former CIA employee, and torture apologist, Michael Scheuer goes on Glenn Beck’s show on Fox, and says that Americans need to die from a terrorist attack:

Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

As Adam Serwer notes:

But understand, this is not unpatriotic. You can wish all manner of horrors on this country, but as long as these horrors might serve a specific political agenda, you’re not being unpatriotic. Unpatriotic is a public health care plan. Unpatriotic is a judge modifying subprime mortgage loans to keep a roof over someone’s head. Unpatriotic is phosphate free detergent. Patriotic is wishing for a terrorist attack on the United States.

Why should we listen to these people about anything. They hate America and Americans.

Credit Where Credit is Due

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On Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC, Chuck Todd said that the emperor had no clothes, when he said that in the Ricci case that, ““he majority actually, well, to put it bluntly, legislated from the bench.”

I have repeatedly called Chuck Todd, “one of the stupidest muthf%$#ers in the White House press room,” for his sometime absurdly naive acceptance of the beltway conventional wisdom.

This is not one of those times though. He nailed it when he described the conservative majority’s intent in this vote as being judicial activism, even if Joe Scarborough reacted like a cow that had just stepped on its own udder.

Pay Per View Review

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It was my just-turned-12-year-old daughter’s turn to choose a movie, and she chose Twilight.

Kristen Stewart … Bella Swan
Robert Pattinson … Edward Cullen
Billy Burke … Charlie Swan
Ashley Greene … Alice Cullen
Nikki Reed … Rosalie Hale
Jackson Rathbone … Jasper Hale
Kellan Lutz … Emmett Cullen
Peter Facinelli … Dr. Carlisle Cullen
Cam Gigandet … James
Taylor Lautner … Jacob Black
Anna Kendrick … Jessica Stanley
Michael Welch … Mike Newton
Christian Serratos … Angela Weber
Gil Birmingham … Billy Black
Elizabeth Reaser … Esme Cullen

It’s a Vampire film, based on the book, which Natalie read, and enjoyed immensely, and it’s very much geared towards tween girls, and so she loved the book, and so chose the movie.

I really tried to talk her out of it, but she was having none of that, and it is a kind of a reward for her reading, so what can a parent do..

The plot is straight forward, Vampire meets girl, they fall in love, damsel in distress ensues.

For what it was, and I would not see this sort of film except under familial duress, it’s of fairly high quality, well shot, and well acted.

I think that the combat sequences could have been a bit better, but I’m a big fan of Kurasawa’s filming of combat in The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress, which has a level of realism that would not match the target audience (12 year old girls).

It is what it is, and if you like what that is, and I really don’t, you’ll enjoy it.

The only surprises were that there were some legitimately funny bits to it, and I felt no need to claw my eyes out.

Post Fires Dan Froomkin

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Because it appears that one of their biggest, if not their biggest, drivers of traffic to their site, just too annoying, he had a brew up with the dishonest and delusional Charles Krauthammer about 2 weeks ago, and I’m sure that he and WaPo editorial chief Fred Hyatt comisserated over martinis and vicodin.

Glenn Greenwald is justifiably outraged.

All that I would add is that the WaPo still has space for Paul Wolfowitz.

It’s depressing. They have what I consider to be the finest comics section in the United States.

No, Coke is Not Supporting the Creationism Clown Show Museum

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Generally, it’s pretty on the ball, but in this case, PZ Meyers is wrong. There is no corporate sponsorship of the Creation clown show Museum, there is a merchandising deal which means that, in exchange for selling only Coca Cola® at their clown show Museum.

That’s what the clown show Museum’s bold claim of corporate partnership means.

It’s kind of like the controversy with the Smithsonian “hosting” an “Intelligent Design” some years back. It turned out that the group rented the space from them.

Boston Globe Newspaper Guild Rejects Wage Cuts

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So the New York Times Corporation is unilaterally implementing a 23% wage cut.

I think that the National Labor Relations board may have something to say about this.

Absent bankruptcy, a contract is a contract.

I think there have been a number of reasons that this was rejected.

First, the Times‘ financial problems, are not as a result of the declines in the newspaper industry, but because of the enormous amount of debt that they took on to build, and move into, a swanky new headquarters building in 2007, and to pay (borrowed) cash for it.

When they could not roll over the short term loan, because of the financial crisis, they had to take a loan from Carlos Slim at very high rates. (14% !)

It also did not help that management handled communications abysmally, refusing to talk to its employees about the offer, refusing to send New York execs to the newsroom, and getting the math wrong, and then refusing to adjust the deadline, and making the cuts for rank and file about 50% larger than those of management.

This wasn’t a communication of the needs of the corporation, it was a communication of contempt for Boston by the folks in New York.

It should also be noted that the fact that the Times was not looking at New York for any give backs, and in fact continues to spend profligately, and just 2 weeks ago, the gift that keeps on giving, Thomas Friedman, shot his mouth off about how he never had to talk to an editor about what he is doing or spending:

Thomas Friedman, the Times’ chief foreign affairs columnist, lauded the efforts that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., has made to keep the newsroom intact, saying, “I just have a great deal of admiration for him.” He told me that since taking his current post, in 1995, he has never been asked by Sulzberger what he was planning to write, or how high his travel expenses would be. “To be able to say what I want to say and go where I want to go—other than a Sulzberger-owned newspaper, you tell me where that exists today.”

(emphasis mine)

So, once again, Thomas Friedman, the man who is always wrong, drops another steaming redolent load on people who are ordinary enough that they have to work for a living.

I don’t know why the pay his travel expenses, he can create fictitious taxicab drivers who say exactly what he wants them to say while sitting at his home.

People Who Do Not Understand that They Are Really Stupid

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Yeah, the New York Times is on a real roll.

In an article on plans going through congress about fixing the US healthcare system, reporter Kevin Sack delivers this bon mot:

But critics argue that with low administrative costs and no need to produce profits, a public plan will start with an unfair pricing advantage. They say that if a public plan is allowed to pay doctors and hospitals at levels comparable to Medicare’s, which are substantially below commercial insurance rates, it could set premiums so low it would quickly consume the market.

(emphasis mine)

Ummm….Let me get this straight, the knock on a public option is that it will be too efficient?

The costs will be too low!!!! And the service will be too good!!!!

Horrors.

Dude, that’s the point. Private insurance has utterly failed!!!! Unless you have them compete against something better, they will stay crappy.

I have an idea, how about we start requiring PCB’s in tap water, because it unfairly competes with bottled water.

Your Liberal Media

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You may have heard a minor media sh%$storm about an OMB report that says that global warming is a farce, and that it will wreck the economy.

Only the report is not a report, it’s just a collection of various opinions from other agencies that the OMB passes on without comment, and it’s just one comment.

And the comment, it came from the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, an office whose only job is to lobby for small businesses, and which has no professional staff, only political appointees.

In this case, the political appointee in question was Joseph Johnson, a former member of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is another right wing funded front. See also here if you can stomach a Glen Beck video.

Needless to say, this did not prevent the New York Times from mindlessly echoing all the spin (also here), along with the rest of usual suspects.

Of course, it took a bunch of couple DFH* bloggers at The Atlantic and Media Matters about a half day to get to the bottom of this, but our main stream media?

Not so much.

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippy.

An Unlikely Voice of Reason

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Jesse “The Body” Ventura, on Larry King, of all places.

VENTURA: No, I live in Mexico now, Larry. So I do a lot of reading. I don’t watch much TV. This year’s reading, I covered Bush’s life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects. And I’m very disturbed about it.

I’m bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we have created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem. I will criticize President Obama on this level; it’s a good thing I’m not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.

KING: You were a Navy SEAL.

VENTURA: That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence — every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.

KING: What was it like?

VENTURA: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

KING: Even though you know it’s not going to happen — even though before it, you know you’re not going to drown.

VENTURA: You don’t know it. If it’s — if it’s done wrong, you certainly could drown. You could swallow your tongue. You could do a whole bunch of stuff. If it’s it done wrong or — it’s torture, Larry. It’s torture.

Sorry Jesse, but our nation has a big deficit.

When Cheney is up for waterboarding, we are taking bids, starting at $1 million.

Suckers Rally

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So, we have Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman saying that a rapid recovery is highly unlikely, and we have Andy Kessler, in the (web) pages of the Wall Street Journal noting the obvious, that, “You can have a jobless recovery but you can’t have a profitless one,” and saying that this sounds like a suckers rally.

One more bit of confirming data to support this is the fact that the main stream media, in the personage of ABC is writing stories saying that, “There is a growing belief among financial experts that the recession is over.”

It’s not just that these “financial experts” were generally the ones who were wrong about deregulation of the markets and the housing bubble. It’s that these “financial experts” are always wrong.

The cause of this recession is a rot at the core of our financial institutions, and I haven’t seen anyone chopping down trees to prevent “Wall Street Elm Disease” from spreading yet.

I’m not looking for a real turnaround until we start seeing “no end in sight” stories from these “financial experts,” so I call suckers rally.