So far, anyway.
Young gal walking down Harvard Street in Brookline – wait for it – talking on a cellphone, dead serious:
Look, I’m arguing with you ’cause you won’t let me win.
Hard to argue with that.
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Overheard Line o’ the Week (pat. pending)
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NYT Obama R.I.P. Edition
Monday’s New York Times pretty much serves as Barack Obama’s obituary.
To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal
There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House except that it happened at all. The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists.
At least the Times editors didn’t call them terrorists.
Next up – Mr. Buzzkill Paul Krugman:
The President Surrenders
A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Adding insult to injury, the normally dismissable Ross Douthat piles on:
The Diminished President
By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.
Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.
Clearly, this debt ceiling deal hasn’t helped.
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Tagged debt ceiling deal, New York Times, Paul Krugman, RIP Obama, Ross Douthat
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NYT Sunday Review Cartoonist Is Just Not Funny
If Brian McFadden isn’t the lamest guy since Gunsmoke’s Chester, he’ll do until someone else comes along.
McFadden’s latest contribution to the New York Times Sunday Review section (click to enlarge):
You’d need to go a long way to find anything more hackneyed, predictable, knee-jerk – your pejorative goes here.
The Times Sunday Review has enough problems without including this dreck.
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Tagged Brian McFadden, Chester, Gunsmoke, New York Times, Sunday review
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Politicians Taxing The English Language
Chalk up another one for the forces of Englessh – the process whereby words take on an ever narrower meaning.
Latest exhibit, from Frank Bruni’s Sunday New York Times column about Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform:
Moments earlier, when he had asked a server about the breakfast options and was directed to a menu right in front of him, he proclaimed, “Oh, it’s written down! Unlike the Gang of Six proposal.” He was against that — it included revenue — and wasn’t about to miss a chance to say so, even this oddly incongruent opportunity.
It included revenue, which has been reduced to meaning “taxes.” It’s something beyond shorthand – more like shrinkhand – similar to “healthcare” meaning healthcare reform.
And it’s not just politicians employing Englessh. TV meteorologists routinely say “we’ll have some weather arriving on Thursday.” No – we always have weather. You Dopplernauts just don’t think good weather counts.
There are other examples, although the hardworking staff can’t think of any right now. Suggestions, splendid readers?
Meanwhile, we’ll try to get Englessh added to the list of infractions we think should be subject to a SYNtax – a fine for misuse of the English language. At a quarter a pop, that could wipe out the deficit in no time.
Of course, that would involve revenue, so don’t hold your breath.
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Tagged Americans for Tax Reform, Dopplernauts, Englessh, Frank Bruni, Grover Norquist, New York Times, shrinkhand, SYNtax
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All The News Of The World That Fits, We Print (NY Post Edition)
The New York Times continues to frolic in the News Corp(se) meltdown, staying on the story like Brown on Williamson.
From Saturday’s edition:
2007 Letter Clearing a Tabloid Comes Under Scrutiny
When the News of the World phone hacking rumpus first got traction four years ago around the emails of one reporter who accessed cellphone messages of royal household staff members, parent company News International got a London law firm to scratch out a one-paragraph letter that “said senior editors were not aware of the reporter’s ‘illegal actions,’ which helped convince lawmakers that hacking was not endemic at the tabloid.”
But . . .
That letter has taken on new significance since it emerged in recent weeks that those e-mails, while not pointing to wider knowledge of hacking, did contain indications of payoffs to the police by journalists in exchange for information.
Ooops.
Another Saturday Times piece hit closer to home:
Precautions at New York Post as Tabloid Inquiry Expands
Employees of The New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s irreverent and hard-charging city tabloid, were told Friday to keep any documents that may pertain to the kind of illegal activity that has led to arrests and a widening investigation at the News Corporation’s British newspapers.
An e-mail to Post journalists on Friday afternoon said News Corporation lawyers had ordered them not to discard anything that relates to any unauthorized access of personal data or payments to government officials.
Priceless message to employees from Post editor Col Allan:
“As we watched the news in the U.K. over the last few weeks, we knew that as a News Corporation tabloid, we would be looked at more closely. So this is not unexpected,” he wrote. “I am sorry for any inconvenience.”
Yes, terribly inconvenient not to destroy incriminating documents.
Also inconvenient: this Sunday Times piece:
British to Expand Inquiry Into Murdoch Media
LONDON — Scotland Yard will expand its investigation of The News of the World and its parent company, police officials said Saturday, adding a new inquiry into possible instances of computer intrusion to the current accusations of phone hacking and payments to police officers.
The new investigation was opened after an examination of “a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy” received since the Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, reopened inquiries in January into possible crimes by newspaper employees, a statement said.
Excellent! More grist for the Times mill.
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Tagged Col Allan, New York Post, New York Times, News Corp(se), News of the World, Rupert Murdoch, Scotland Yard
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WCVB Jumps The Shark
Via Mediaite:
Boston Man Jumps Off Boat To Ride A Shark (And Videotapes Entire Thing)
What is the best part of this news story from Boston’s WCVB about a fisherman who decided to jump off his boat and ride a shark for fun? Is it the fact that the man, Erik Jacobs, video taped the whole thing? Is it the fact that the shark was 15 feet long? Is it the fact that the “ar” sound in shark really pops thanks to Jacob’s awesome Boston accent? No. The best part of this story is the sub headline that WCVB uses in their Internet write up:
“Wildlife Officials Say Ride Dangerous”
Gee, you think?
Video:
This guy’s an even bigger idiot than the WCVB captioneer.
Who Was Epocrates?
Friday’s New York Times featured a piece on a free smartphone app called Epocrates that lets doctors “look up information on drug dosing, interactions and insurance coverage while seeing a patient.”
Ads included.
But like so much else on the Web, “free” comes with a price: doctors must wade through marketing messages on Epocrates that try to sway their choices of which drugs to prescribe.
The article points out that “[d]octors exposed to drug company information often prescribe more often, at a higher cost and with less quality,” but it never says who Epocrates was.
Turns out he was nobody.
From the corporate website:
Named after the Greek physician Hippocrates, Epocrates squeezes the contents of the Physicians’ Desk Reference into a 4-ounce mobile computer, giving doctors access to information about more than 1,500 commonly prescribed medications.
Epocrates, we hardly knew thee.
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Tagged Epocrates, Hippocrates, New York Times, smartphone app
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The GOP’s “Non-Negotiable Terrorist Demand”
On Friday’s PBS NewsHour, liberal chinstroker Mark Shields accused Congressional Republicans of issuing a “non-negotiable terrorist demand” in the debt-ceiling rumpus on Capitol Hill – namely, the requirement for passage of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution before the debt limit could be raised.
Discussion Topic #1:
If a Republican had said that about Democratic lawmakers’ demands for tax increases, would it have gotten this little response in the news media?
Discussion Topic #2:
Remember back in 2004 when Ron Suskind wrote a New York Times piece about the Bush administration that featured this anecdote?
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Welcome to Reality 2.0.
Can we agree that Tea Party Republicans are living in a parallel universe? Asking for Congress to pass a balanced budget amendment is like saying “We won’t raise the debt limit until Sheryl Crow endorses Charmin.”
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Arizona Sen. John McCain (R-Just Tell Me What You Want Me To Be) called them “tea party hobbits.” The hardworking staff calls them teatotalers.
Let The $4 Billion Rumpus Begin! (Labor Unions Edition)
The latest addition to the political air wars (via ABC’s The Note) comes compliments of a coalition of labor unions – AFSCME, SEIU, and etc. – whacking Republican lawmakers for bringing the U.S. to the brink of default.
From TPM:
The new spots will run in media markets targeting Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV), Rep. Bobby Schilling (R-IL), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-MN), Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY), Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA).
Here’s the one targeting Cantor:
You got that? The GOP is all about billionaires, oil companies, and corporate jets – the new Axis of Evil.
From here, it’s just going to be a blur of blame-assigning. There’s just no bottom to that well.
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Tagged ABC The Note, AFSCME, Axis of Evil, billionaires, corporate jets, Eric Cantor, oil companies, SEIU, TPM
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Zev Chafets Writes Another NYT Rightwing Mash Note
This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features the latest big wet conservative kiss by Zev Chafets (to go along with his previous Rush Limbaugh and Jim Cramer NYT profiles).
Now, say hello to Mr. Media Ambush James O’Keefe, who has pimped out ACORN and punked NPR.
Chafets:
O’Keefe aspires to more than making movies. He seems to be styling himself as the organizer and commander in chief of a vast guerrilla army of young conservatives trained in his methods and inspired by his example. “There are already dozens of teams out there working,” he told me. “And there are thousands more who want to learn and get involved. The more they restrict me, the more they inspire me.” He extracted a cellphone from the pocket of his work shirt. “Have you ever heard of a Russian named Solzhenitsyn?” he asked. The question reminded me that O’Keefe, who in some ways is knowing and cynical, is also just 27. For a moment I thought he was going to call the Soviet dissident, who died in 2008, but he simply wanted to access and declaim a few lines of a Solzhenitsyn speech on liberty, law and the abuse of government power, which he thought I should find relevant to his predicament.
“I’m not comparing my situation to the gulag,” he said. “But I speak truth to power. You’d think liberal baby boomers would support me. Isn’t that what the ’60s were all about? Do we really want political prisoners in America?” Still, the restrictions he faced weren’t really slowing him down. As we spoke, he told me, an army of videographers was spreading out across the land and taking aim at a fresh target. This will be the biggest one yet, he promised.
Chafets is a rightwing enabler. Why the New York Times is enabling him is anyone’s guess.
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Tagged ACORN, James O'Keefe, Jim Cramer, mash note, Mr. Media Ambush, New York Times, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, Zev Chafets
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Campaign Outsider 