Categorical Aperitif

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// posted by nash @ 9:49 PM 1 comments

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// posted by nash @ 9:02 AM 1 comments

Eric Boehlert surveys Fox's maniacally pro-BP coverage and wonders whether "there may soon be a collective A-ha moment about Fox News with regard to its defense of BP."

Alas, he used the word "collective," to which many of the Fox faithful are programmed to respond with screams of "BLARRGH! SOCIALISM!!!"

So it goes.

// posted by nash @ 9:00 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 8:37 PM 1 comments

Gaaaaah. If you gave The Three Stooges a morning show, I don't think it could out-stupid Fox & Friends.

The Daily Show calls her "the smart-lady meat in a doofus sandwich," but it seems to me that Stanford-educated Gretchen Carlson's main job on F&F is to ensure that her creamy, Rubenesque thighs are always prominently displayed. I mean, jeez, every time I see a clip of that show on TDS or at Media Matters or wherever, there those puppies are, usually demurely crossed but always unclothed just south of shamesville. It's almost like they don't want the male part of their audience to think too much about what she says—or something.

// posted by nash @ 8:24 PM 1 comments

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// posted by nash @ 12:05 PM 1 comments

Urgh. This has been a rough week—and next week promises to be worse. More later.

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Dean Baker peruses a "budget guide" produced by an organization funded by billionaire deficit scold Pete Peterson and finds it...characteristically wanting.

The "Federal Budget 101," the guidebook for the discussion, follows a predictably shoddy path. The book discusses the budget in almost complete isolation from any larger discussion of the economy. There is virtually no discussion of the ways in which the budget fosters growth, for example by funding education, research and infrastructure, nor the way in which the pattern of growth affects the budget.

For example, the booklet never discusses the extent to which the economic mismanagement that allowed the unchecked growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble contributed to the debt that is its central concern. The downturn caused by the resulting economic collapse will eventually add more than $3 trillion to the country's debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office's projections.

The booklet also neglects to point out the extent to which the long-term budget disaster story is driven by our broken health care system. If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any other wealthy country, we would be looking at enormous budget surpluses in the long-term, not deficits.

Incredibly, the booklet does not even point out the fact that income is projected to grow over time. The average hourly wage is projected to buy 20 percent more in 2025 (the year for which participants are supposed to design a budget) than it does today. This knowledge might affect how people view things like tax increases. For example, if we know that people will be on average 20 percent richer, we might be less concerned if their tax rate were to rise by one to two percentage points.

The booklet also never mentions the plunge in wealth that older workers have suffered as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble and plunge in the stock market. This has left the bulk of near retirees (those in their late 40s and 50s) facing retirement with almost nothing other than their Social Security and Medicare.

The booklet even gets its basic economics wrong, warning participants at the very beginning that rising deficits can lead to a weaker dollar. In the real econ 101, students learn just the opposite - that budget deficits can jack up interest rates, leading to a stronger dollar. This is how a budget deficit can be tied to a trade deficit - by raising the value of the dollar. A higher dollar makes US exports more expensive to foreigners and imports cheaper for people living in the United States.

People who want to see our trade deficit fall want a lower dollar. Getting the value of the dollar down (not up) is an argument that more serious people would give for a smaller budget deficit. Peterson should have been able to get a better product for his millions.

Finally, it is striking that not a single person connected with this project was among those who warned of the housing bubble before its collapse wrecked the economy. Ostensibly, America Speaks tried to include a diverse range of economists and policy analysts. Yet, in the category of people who recognized the biggest economic disaster of the last 80 years, America Speaks came up completely empty.

Well, *I* wish that, anyway.

// posted by nash @ 9:10 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 7:31 AM 2 comments

Not just a Beavis & Butthead joke, oh no.

See also Jared Diamond on "Easter's End."

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// posted by nash @ 9:01 PM 0 comments

Ye gods, this really is the United States of Petroleum.

It really is a sad state of affairs when Richard Nixon winds up looking like the ecologically sanest U.S. president of the last half century or so.

// posted by nash @ 8:40 PM 2 comments

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// posted by nash @ 8:01 AM 3 comments

I've mentioned before the right-winger I knew in college who delighted in referring to The Washington Post as "The Washington Pravda." This was back in the Reagan years, and he was just reciting standard cant about "the liberal media": he was suggesting that one of the great Establishment newspapers was in fact Working for the Other Side in the Cold War, seeking to undermine all that is Good and Holy and American, etc. As I've also mentioned, many years later, I came to see that he was right, but for the wrong reason: the Post did often function in a manner analogous to Pravda, as a kind of dutiful Establishment organ. His and his comrades' incessant whining about "liberal bias" merely concealed a longing for a newspaper even more devoted to repeating conventional wisdom and even less willing to challenge powerful government and corporate institutions.

I was reminded of this recently as I read Glenn Greenwald's long post about the weird Bradley Manning/WikiLeaks whistleblower case. Pravda on the Potomac's service to power continues apace:

The reason this story matters so much -- aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term -- is the unique and incomparably valuable function WikiLeaks is fulfilling. Even before the Apache helicopter leak, I wrote at length about why they are so vital, and won't repeat all of that here. Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy.

What makes WikiLeaks particularly threatening to the most powerful factions is that they cannot control it. Even when whistle-blowers in the past have leaked serious corruption and criminal conduct to perfectly good journalists at the nation's largest corporate media outlets, government officials could control how the information was disclosed. When the NYT learned in 2004 that the Bush administration was illegally eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, George Bush summoned the paper's Publisher and Executive Editor to the Oval Office, demanded that the story not be published, and the paper complied by sitting on it for a full year until after Bush was safely re-elected. When The Washington Post's Dana Priest learned that the CIA was maintaining a network of secret prisons -- black sites -- she honored the request of "senior U.S. officials" not to identify the countries where those prisons were located so as to not disrupt the U.S.'s ability to continue to use those countries for such projects.

Both WikiLeaks and Manning have stated that The Washington Post's David Finkel, when writing his book on Iraq two years ago, had possession of the Apache helicopter video but never released it to the public (Manning: "Washington Post sat on the video … David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here"). As Columbia Journalism Review reported, both the Post and Finkel were quite coy and evasive in addressing that claim, pointedly insisting that "the Post" had never possessed that video while refusing to say whether Finkel did. The same thing happened when, on the same day, I called Finkel to ask him about WikiLeaks' claim that they possessed but never released that video. He very curtly told me, using careful legalistic language, that "the Post never had the video," but before I could ask whether Finkel himself did, he abruptly told me he couldn't talk anymore and had nothing else to say, and then hung up on me. My inquiries to the Post were met with a pro forma response that "The Washington Post did not have the video, nor did we sit on anything," but these Journalistic Crusaders for Transparency refused to answer my question as to whether Finkel himself did.

// posted by nash @ 7:58 AM 0 comments

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Sara Robinson interviews Alexander Zaitchick, whose new book on Glenn Beck I recently got but have not yet had time to read. The interview is worthwhile, but I must say, Robinson's intro is a work of art in its own right:

America has this long tradition of twisted, odd, widely beloved and yet darkly dangerous right-wing cultural impresarios that pop up out of our landscape like cultural tornadoes, leaving huge swaths of derangement and destruction in their wake. Aimee Semple McPherson. Father Coughlin. Joe McCarthy. Once in a while, when the cultural cross-currents intersect just so, they rise on the whirlwind, gather huge followings, and lead their followers on a furious high-velocity turn that blows across the countryside in desperate pursuit of a utopia only they can see. These maunderings are typically mercifully short and usually end in disaster, for both the people who started the storm as well as those who got swept away in it. And all is forgotten—until the next time.

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// posted by nash @ 7:13 PM 2 comments

I can't honestly say that I liked Helen Thomas all that much, and I can't honestly say that I found her "go back to Germany and Poland" remark anything less than appalling. I can honestly say, though, that this Daily Show takedown of the giggling cretins vying for her front-row chair:

...goes nicely with the thoughts of William Rivers Pitt:

Like Helen Thomas, I was one of the reporters out there who strenuously pushed back against the war rhetoric from the Bush White House, rhetoric which was inevitably parroted and amplified by the mainstream media. Unlike Helen Thomas, I made very little headway in altering the narrative. Thomas, from her front-row seat in the press room, was a very public thorn in the side of every Bush press secretary who tried to sell the public a bill of rotten goods.

Had the press and the Bush administration paid heed to Helen Thomas, there would not be 5,000 new graves at Arlington National Cemetery. There would not be 40,000 plus wounded American soldiers. There would not be thousands and thousands more suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments, who are unable to get proper treatment from an over-stressed Veterans Affairs' system. There would not have been soldiers left to rot in Walter Reed. There would not be more than a million dead and maimed Iraqis. The Sunnis would not have been massacred, and Iran would not now be in full control of Iraq. There would not have been hundreds of billions of our tax dollars poured into the sand and into the coffers of Bush-friendly "defense" contractors; they call our current economic situation the "Great Recession," but by rights, it should be called the "Iraq Recession," and it would not be as bad as it is had we listened to Helen Thomas.

Perhaps, these things were inevitable. Bush and his crew wanted a war, and if the entire press corps had been made up of Helen Thomas clones, it is entirely possible we would have wound up mired in that filthy conflict anyway. But Thomas tried when her colleagues did not. Thomas asked sharp questions when her colleagues refused. Thomas wrote the truth when her colleagues reprinted Bush administration talking points to protect their seats in the press room. Helen Thomas was right, did right, just as she has done with every administration since John F. Kennedy.

One stupid comment cannot wash away 60 years of credibility and honor. One stupid comment cannot wash away the fight she waged against the Bush administration's criminal campaign in Iraq. One stupid comment cannot wash away the fact that, by her very existence, Helen Thomas exposed the mainstream media for what they are, and no matter how vigorously they jump on her today, they all know the blood remains on their hands.

// posted by nash @ 6:56 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 7:36 PM 0 comments

Forgive the dearth of posts—and forgive this one for being mostly a cut-and-paste—but things are busy as heck here, in part because my 94-year-old uncle has had another health setback; I've spent a good chunk of the last two weeks bouncing back and forth between hospital, nursing home, etc. He's better than he was when he went to the hospital two weeks ago, but "better" is an awfully relative term when you're 94; right now, we're mostly hoping that he can recover enough to go home to his retirement community and face whatever his remaining life has in store for him there as opposed to spending his last days in a nursing home. I've already had my fill of dealing with what passes for the "health care" industry here, and I fear I may have weeks of it yet to go. Please send any good vibes you can spare my uncle's way—and send any extra to me, 'cause man, dealing with this draculesque industry makes me wanta drive a stake through somebody's heart.

I managed to do some catching up with news today, though, I couldn't resist passing on this sadly hilarious dispatch from a Mother Jones reporter dealing with the "authorities" on the befouled beaches of Louisiana:

The blockade to Elmer's [Island, Louisiana] is now four cop cars strong. As we pull up, deputies start bawling us out; all media need to go to the Grand Isle community center, where a "BP Information Center" sign now hangs out front. Grand Isle residents are not amused by the beach closing.I nside, a couple of Times-Picayune reporters circle BP representative Barbara Martin, who tells them that if they want passage to Elmer they have to get it from another BP flack, Irvin Lipp; Grand Isle beach is closed too, she adds. When we inform the Times-Pic reporters otherwise, she asks Dr. Hazlett if he's a reporter; he says, "No." She says, "Good." She doesn't ask me. We tell her that deputies were just yelling at us, and she seems truly upset. For one, she's married to a Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputy. For another, "We don't need more of a black eye than we already have."

"But it wasn't BP that was yelling at us, it was the sheriff's office," we say.

"Yeah, I know, but we have…a very strong relationship."

"What do you mean? You have a lot of sway over the sheriff's office?"

"Oh yeah."

"How much?"

"A lot."

When I tell Barbara I am a reporter, she stalks off and says she's not talking to me, then comes back and hugs me and says she was just playing. I tell her I don't understand why I can't see Elmer's Island unless I'm escorted by BP. She tells me BP's in charge because "it's BP's oil."

"But it's not BP's land."

"But BP's liable if anything happens."

"So you're saying it's a safety precaution."

"Yeah! You don't want that oil gettin' into your pores."

"But there are tourists and residents walking around in it across the street."

"The mayor decides which beaches are closed." So I call the Grand Isle police requesting a press liason, only to get routed to voicemail for Melanie with BP. I call the police back and ask why they gave me a number for BP; they blame the fire chief.

I reach the fire chief. "Why did the police give me a number for BP?" I ask.

"That's the number they gave us."

"Who?"

"BP."

// posted by nash @ 7:33 PM 1 comments

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// posted by nash @ 9:26 PM 1 comments

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// posted by nash @ 8:28 AM 0 comments

Democracy Now! is on 'em in Louisiana.

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