FIRST DRAFT

Sen. Flaming Bag of Dogshit is All Butthurt Over People Asking Questions

How dare journalists question his stance on disaster relief after a disaster in his state: 

Funding questions show the crassness of Washington over the sensitivity we need for Oklahoma. 

Oklahoma does, indeed, need "sensitivity." They also need money. Lots of it. In quantities you really only want the federal government to be able to distribute with all due speed. 

And I fail to see how it's insensitive to ask when the damn money comin' given that serving his constituents is Coburn's entire goddamn job. This is what politics IS, making decisions about what money goes to what. If reporters were haranguing this nice lady and her dog, I could see the issue, but Tom Coburn is in government, he should get used to people speaking to him about things that matter. 

Was Coburn flattened by a tornado recently? Did he lose everything he had? Is his car in the neighbor's tree? Christ, what, are we supposed to observe a moment of silence for his ears having been assualted by the sound of words? 

The commenters are even unkinder to his follow-up effort: 

How about the crassness of our Oklahoma politicians who would limit the needed help to our fellow Oklahomans, only to make a political point. If a vote for additional aid helps one person, it is worth it, even of it slightly elevates our debt. To limit it is what is crass...

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Funding questions show the crassness of degenerates like you. Not Washington; you. It is you, Senator, who needs to focus on recovery and not play dirty politics in the midst of tragedy. Shame on you, Senator. We all know what you really care about, and it is not your constituents.

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Its absolutely unconscionable for you to say that any funding for disaster relief should be offset,sen. vote for the funding stop playing politic, and s the people in Oklahoma need tornado shelters I think its despicable for you Politicians to not have shelters for the schools you all are shameful

A. 

Shorter Press: We Have Nothing to Do With this Story Everyone is Talking About

Pick which of these statements "rings truer," because that is the standard by which we measure truth: 

Hard as it may be, then, set aside your own politics and ask yourself which of these Monday statements rings truer:

"The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow. ... And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there's something new to the story. There's no 'there' there."

— President Barack Obama, dismissing congressional scrutiny of his and his subordinates' statements about Benghazi as a "political circus"

"Americans should take notice that top Obama administration officials increasingly see themselves as above the law and emboldened by the belief that they don't have to answer to anyone." 

— House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa

For now, many among us would take Option 2. With each of these troubling disclosures, the Obama administration finds itself reacting to appearances of overreach, of arrogance, of determination to dodge its embarrassments rather than to take ownership of them.

I wonder why the Obama administration finds itself reacting to these things. Could it be because people are asking them to react? This is the kind of passive-voiced, "a firestorm of controversy is swirling" commentary that makes me crazy, because it cites the appearance of a thing as evidence that the thing itself exists. And in doing so, reinforces that appearance, conflates it with evidence, and elevates "stuff we kind of think already" to actual fact. You want to make an issue out of something? THEN MAKE AN ISSUE OUT OF IT. Knock off the fashion coverage. I know that's the only part of this that interests anybody, but come on. 

Am I happy about the AP phone records sitch. Hell. No. Not okay. The administration should be "on the defensive" about that. But here's the thing, even there: The administration "being on the defensive" isn't the story. What is this, the NFL? The story is what was done and who did it, not how the Obama White House is starting to "seem:"

Taken together, though, these controversies project a less flattering image of truth-shading, hubris and intrusion. In the week of humiliating disclosures that started with last Wednesday's congressional hearing on Benghazi, Americans haven't seen the administration exhibit ... one shred of humility:

Ah. So it's about what words they use. The image they project. The proper pantomime of humility. The theater of the thing. If the administration would just be sufficiently servile, people wouldn't have died and none of this would be an issue anymore. If they'd just all hold their pickle forks the right way, I mean, honestly, how hard is that? 

The easiest way for the president and his White House to further that rising suspicion — we emphasize that it's thus far unproven — is to demonstrate three things to his newly energized foes and to his friends who didn't expect this sort of conduct: that his subordinates will end their egregious stonewalling on Benghazi, will pursue the IRS scandal as high as it goes and will demand full disclosure of whether his Justice Department scrupulously followed the law in its pursuit of journalists' phone records.

We don't know if any of what Obama's critics are saying is true (on the IRS and Benghazi it's demonstrably not and has been proved not to be for some damn time) but the president needs to act like it is, to demonstrate, once again, the proper attitude to us. The president needs to concede every point, to prove that there are no points here, and maybe flog himself in the Rose Garden. You've got people screaming THIS HASN'T BEEN INVESTIGATED! and when you show them the records of the investigations they just keep yelling it, I mean, you tell me what can be done here in exactly 20 minutes that will solve the problem of every single person in America not knowing every detail of what happened. Should Obama go to everybody's house and read the paper to them? 

Maybe that would clear up how he "seems." 

A. 

 

The Beltway Borg Collective

I have Star Trek on my mind. There's a lot of hype surrounding the second JJ Abrams prequel/reboot/whatever in addition to Matt Yglesias' amusing exegesis of the franchise at Slate. It's got me thinking about the Star Trek super villains, the Borg. You know, the cyborgs who assimilate their victims into a hive-like collective. You know, just like the American political media.

It was inevitable that the MSM would revive the Second Term jinx meme. It's inevitable in the same way that 2016 election stories are: they're lazy and focused only on the horse race or scandal aspects of politics.Here's a quick sound (word?) bite from one of the avatars of the Beltway Borg Collective, the WaPo's Dana Milbank:

Well, that didn’t take long.

Four months into a fresh four years, President Obama is already assuming the familiar crouch of a scandal-struck second-termer.

There it is, y'all. There's a second term curse/jinx/hex/spell or a combination thereof. What's really going on is that the news cycle has churned out a bunch of stories that the Beltway Borg Collective is lumping together. I remain convinced that the Benghazi story is phonier than a 3 dollar bill. The IRS story seems localized and undirected by the administration but it does play neatly into the mega-wingnut narrative, which is why it will have legs. I don't personally approve of what happened with the AP but GOPers are now denouncing Holder for doing something that they demanded he do last year. Of course, hypocrisy is as American as Mom, apple pie and Chevrolet.

The main point of this post, if there is one, is that our political press remains afflicted with group think and, as always, resistance is futile.

People Want News

David Carr, in a masterpiece of scorn and fury: 

The industry tried chasing clicks for a while to win back fleeing advertisers, decided it was a fool’s errand and is now turning to customers for revenue. But in order to charge people for news, you have to prosecute journalism.

The belief that historic monopolies will hold together just on the basis of inertia has proved to be wrong. Newspapers that have cut their operations beyond usefulness or quit delivering a daily print presence have suffered. The audience has to be earned every day.

You cannot give people less, and expect them not to notice, not anymore and not for almost two decades now. And I would welcome this newfound sensibility with a parade of hookers handing out balloons and blow if a) it hadn't taken a brutal decade of layoffs and bankruptcies to get here and b) I didn't think most newspaper owners won't do the same thing again at the first sign of a new idea. What this really was about was laziness and avarice, and I see no sign of that going away.

It's all so unnecessary. More people are reading online? Screw it, let's put everything online and fire a bunch of folks and stop delivering the damn paper. Plenty of poeple still read the paper, though, and pay for the paper. Why not have everything online and have a paper? I will never understand why people act like you have to pick. Granted, you can't make one reporter do 99 things, but as a business, why not have a great web site and a great paper and great mobile and great video? Why does one thing have to suffer for something else to succeed? 

And why would you ever, ever, ever make your product harder for your customer to understand? 

The company endlessly complicated what had been a simple proposition that has worked since the newspaper’s founding in 1837: deliver a printed bundle of its best efforts every day for a fixed price. The new distribution plan is hard to explain, but I will do my best.

On Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, a broadsheet called The Times-Picayune will be available for home delivery and on the newsstands for 75 cents. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, a tabloid called TPStreet will be available only on newsstands for 75 cents.

In addition, a special electronic edition of TPStreet will be available to the three-day subscribers of the home-delivered newspaper. On Saturdays, there will be early print editions of the Sunday Times-Picayune with some breaking news and some Sunday content.

There’s more, but you get the idea — or not. It’s an array of products, frequencies and approaches that is difficult to explain, much less market.

What the CHRIST. People know what flailing looks like, and this is it, and ain't nobody wants to be at a party that isn't the cool party anymore. Plus, and I've learned this in my offline life over the past 15 years, if you need a second sentence to explain your thing, it's already over. By the time you take a breath and go into part two, people have already moved on.

Not a lot of things are true about newspapers that are true about all businesses but this is: Customers aren't complicated. They don't want to hear your explanations and they certainly don't want to hear your whining. They want to hear that you have a service that will make their lives better, that will be given to them in a manner that requires a minimum amout of work on their part. That's all there is. As Carr puts it: 

The much ballyhooed unmaking of daily newspapering seems to be unmaking itself, and there’s a reason for that. Most newspapers have hung onto the ancient practice of embedding prose on a page and throwing it in people’s yards because that’s where the money and the customers are for the time being.

Shocking. If only someone had seen that coming. 

A. 

A Masterpiece of the False Equivalence Genre

Take it away, NYT: 

Nominees at all levels of Washington’s bureaucracy — 117 of them in all, including cabinet secretaries, judges and members of obscure oversight boards — are facing delays. Just last week, the Senate confirmed David Medine, the president’s choice to lead the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The time between his nomination and confirmation was 510 days. Every Republican voted no.

The shrinking number of senators from both parties who are willing to cross the aisle and the growing appeal of adding a “no” vote on a presidential nominee to a political résumé have contributed to the slowdown.

BOTH SIDES BOTH SIDES BOTH SIDES DO IT! 

This doesn't even make sense. Precisely how are Democrats supposed to cross the aisle and vote for a Democratic president's nominees? Are Democrats supposed to vote for Republican ... what, Obamacare repeals, in order to prove to Republicans that they're willing to cross the aisle, so that Republicans can cross the aisle on other things, because common courtesy is binding right now, and doing something nice and generous for others totally means the other person will always and forever do something nice for you, because that's how that always works.

Bending over backwards to make sure nobody gets upset at a story that seems to place blame on anyone produces a story that blames everyone, and therefore the reader gets the impression that this is all just a big impossible mess with no solution because everybody in Washington is such an intractible asshole. Therefore the reader assumes that there are no solutions, except maybe to not elect assholes, but that is hard because everyone is an asshole. 

The implicit message in a story like this, to the readers, is DON'T GET UP FROM YOUR CHAIR. Don't bother. Both parties are equally bad in this. Everyone's complicit. There's nothing you can do. Don't look at this and say, hmm, if only one party wasn't filibustering the nominees of another party's elected president. Both sides need to cross the aisle, even if Democrats are already on the side they need to be on to do what they said they were going to do. Don't look at this and see a solution, which is to really reform the filibuster, quit electing immature and egomaniacal douchebags, and properly call out nonsense as it's seen. Don't look at this and see answers. Everything's hopeless. Don't bother. 

A. 

Slow motion suicide

That's how LBJ's right hand man Joe Califano famously described cigarette smoking when he was Carter's HHS Secretary. It fits what's happening at the New Orleans Sometimes Picayune since NOLA tycoon/unsuccessful political candidate John Georges bought the Advocate.

Here's my pal Kevin Allman on the latest turn of the screw:

Since New Orleans businessman John Georges bought The Advocate just a week ago, things have been moving quickly. Georges installed former T-P managing editors Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea as editor and general manager, and there was word that The Advocate's Baronne Street offices were adding several additional parking spaces immediately. It was a poorly kept secret that the paper had been talking to T-P city editor Gordon Russell, and only a slightly better kept secret that The Advocate was also interested in Martha Carr, a veteran of the city desk known as a meticulous editor.

"If Gordon and Martha go," a city reporter told Gambit Saturday night, "we all go."

And that's what seems to be happening. This morning Kovacs announced that Russell would be joining the New Orleans Advocate (not the New Orleans bureau of The Advocate, but "the New Orleans Advocate", a change in terminology). Also leaving the T-P: city reporters Claire Galofaro and Andrew Vanacore. (Former T-P staffer Sara Pagones, who had been helming the New Orleans bureau since it launched last fall, will now be St. Tammany bureau chief.) Russell becomes The Advocate's managing editor for investigations, while Carr will be the New Orleans paper's managing editor.

Another term for this could be, "dying the death of a thousand cuts." There's a simple word for what Advance Media did here in NOLA: stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

A quick word about now former city editor Gordon Russell. He's not only an outstanding investigative journalist and editor, he's also a friend who lives a long stones throw from Adrastos World Headquarters. I am very happy that he's getting off the sinking ship before it hits bottom.

So much for TPStreet, which sounds like a bad cop show from the Freddie Silverman era at ABC.

The newspaper war is turning into a rout.

Sounds like a drinking joke to me

The internet is aflame with Biden click bait again. This time we're told that it's a "dirty joke" but unless there's more context to it than I've seen yet, it's another "the Irish love to drink" one-liner thrown out by our teetotaler Veep:

 

Even if it's a mildly "dirty joke," I'm not sure why the malakas at the Weekly Standard think that stuff like this damages Biden because it doesn't. People *like* Joey the Shark precisely because he's so real and occasionally off-the-wall. In the UK, a Tory spin-off anti-establishment party, UKIP, did well in last week's county elections. There's been a lot of portentous and downright pretentious stuff written about why this happened when, in fact, they did well, in part, because UKIP's leader, Nigel Farage is a "cheeky chappy" with a common touch. Joe Biden is our very own cheeky chappy. Nuff said.

This Is Exactly the Problem

YOU DON'T HAVE TO GIVE A SHIT WHAT SOMEBODY IN POWER TELLS YOU: 

“I regret any error that ever got into the paper, but from where I sat, there was a total congruence — everything was coalescing around one message,” he said, noting that The Times was far from alone in its reporting. “I was suspicious, and perhaps I should have been more aggressive in pursuing that suspicion.”

Yes, you should have, given that being suspicious of what people in power say is YOUR ENTIRE GODDAMN JOB. You are not there for anything else. It's one thing to report the message that government officials are putting out. It's another to act like that message makes you helpless to say anything about it. God, what a morally bankrupt, cowardly little asshole. "Ooh, this guy said a thing, from a very big podium, which made it hard for me to open my mouth and use words to ask questions, because of magic and sorcery." What in the fuck were you, oh great editor of the New York Times, afraid of? 

And what COULD you have been afraid of that would have been worse than helping to prop up a war that left hundreds of thousands of people dead AND TURNED OUT TO BE BULLSHIT? 

A. 

I Have Personally Touched Gays So I Can Call Them Sinners

This Broussard guy:

I’m saying all that to say that if I can play basketball with a homosexual, just about anyone can.

I’ve played in several rec leagues with LZ Granderson, who is an openly gay writer at ESPN The Magazine.

I consider LZ a friend. I’ve gone out to lunch with him, talked music, sports, politics and lots of other things with him. I greet him with a handshake and a hug, just like I greet lots of other guys.

By the way, LZ can ball. In a league in New York City that features several former college players, we both made the All-Star team. He was kind of like our Shawn Marion minus the dunks (though he claims he can still slam!) and I was like our Gilbert Arenas (high game of 39, thank you).

Anyway, when we play in our rec league games, I give him high fives and hugs. Same with one of his friends who is on the team and also gay.

SEE! I touched them! The openly gays! I touched them with my hands! Hugged them! Our pecs touched. Our nipples engaged one another's. I felt his well-developed shoulders and the warmth of his skin on mine. This tactile experience did not magically make me not a tool and a douchebag, which proves that in America opinions are not transmitted by skin-to-skin contact, and that proves that it's okay that I think being gay is a sin. My friends dig it when I hug them, and am honest with them about how they're going to hell! It's all good. 

I'm asking: Has there ever been a column by The Gay Friends saying "I have bigot friends, and we agree to disagree because that's America, man?" Because I feel like until we start reading that all the time, even the most loving encounters get rendered into this thing where somebody is emotional scenery for My Journey To Enlightenment, Or Not, In This Specific Case. I mean, so long as The Gay Friends are good with their asshole pals, who am I to interfere, but we never hear from The Gays Some Bro Does Not Mind Touching, and I feel like that's on purpose. 

This whole thing is goddamn stupid. I can tell you all about Gay Fellows I Have Cuddled or Girls I Have Kissed While Watching Firefly Together or what have you, but if I get up in the morning and I talk about how I don't think they deserve the same rights as anyone else under the law, if I say that in my considered opinion they are not as glorious to God as any other human being, how does my once having held a lesbian's hand excuse those opinions? How does it affect them at all, come to think of it? I'm a bigot because I hold bigoted opinions, not because I have or lack proximity to homosexuals. 

I think a lot of the problem is that we, straight people we, have come to define homophobia, bigotry, as the Worst Case Scenario. As the Westboro Baptist Church, and as long as you don't rise to that level you're okay. As long as you don't stand outside your gay neighbor's house with a FAG SIN poster, you're not "homophobic," so you can't be doing or saying anything objectionable or wrong. As if this stuff isn't all about degrees, and about recognizing when something's not about you. 

As if all this is, all anything is, is a chance to show off your private stable of beliefs and then declare on behalf of those affected by them that everything is cool, because as you walked off the basketball court you said, "Good game," and you looked them right in their very gay eyeballs when you did it. 

A. 

Make up your mind already

The New Orleans Sometimes-Picayune has announced-get ready-a new print edition with a hipster douchebag name, TP Street. It will be in the tabloid format, which many of us suggested they go to in order to save money on paper. Reaction here has been scathing. Me, I think it's simultaneously pitiful and hilarious.

I'll let my pals Liprap and Kevin Hippie-Hater have the last word.

I lied, this whole thing has got me, uh, thinking:

 

Tom Brokaw, the Country Turns its Lonely Eyes to You

This was just a bridge too far: 

Veteran newsman Tom Brokaw said that the White House Correspondents' Dinner officially jumped the shark when troubled actress Lindsay Lohan attended the annual event. 

“The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan,” Brokaw told Politico in a story published Friday. “She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break.”

Lohan was a guest of Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren at the 2012 dinner. 

Really? Lindsay Lohan. That was too much for you? Not the presidents joking about drone attacks or weapons of mass destruction, not all of you acting like you deserved some kind of cookie for showing up and pointing a camera or a recorder in the president's direction? It was Lindsay Lohan.

I can see that, actually. For like 40 years our capitol press has only been able to get het up about shit that matters not at all. I can see where an actress with a visible drug problem (as opposed to probably 2/3 of the audience's who-knows-what issues) who's easy to make fun of because she has no power whatsoever compared to Oh So Sober and Serious You is just the absolute height of what you consider gauche. 

But hey, maybe it's not all about the actress: 

Following last year's event, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News criticized the soiree, saying it “separates the press from the people that they’re supposed to serve, symbolically.”

It must have hurt you to be there in years past: 

You know what, seriously, the bitching about this event gets worse every year. I mean, go or don't go, but don't talk about how you're really too good to go and how, even though you've been sucking down free drinks for years, it's getting old and tired and it's not the cool party anymore and now it's just actresses you don't like. It's not designed to change anything, it's just designed to point out how superior you are. To Lindsay Lohan. Because that's hard to do these days, poor kid. 

A. 

How We Tell Stories Now

Adrian Holovaty, who founded the late, much-lamented EveryBlock: 

 Clearly there's a template somewhere with a default title "Boston.com viral video page," and the URLs are hard-coded to include "viral_page". And let's keep some perspective: overall, what's important here is the news event itself, not the details of how one particular CMS titled a video.

And I don't mean to berate Boston.com. As somebody who used to work for news sites, I have been in their shoes. There are many, many more important things for a news organization to do in this situation -- vet new information, feverishly post updates and, well, keep the site up and running under huge traffic levels! And to their credit, after I posted a snarky tweet about it, a few Boston.com folks responded within minutes, saying they were migrating videos to YouTube and didn't have much control over their software.

But I'm writing this because I think there's an important lesson here for makers of Web products. That lesson is: tools will be repurposed, and they should be designed with that in mind.

Whoever designed this video gallery system (sounds like it might've been a vendor) was too narrow-minded. Judging by the URL and default page title, it was meant to be a clearinghouse for viral videos, but it ended up being used forall types of videos. They ought to have designed for broad use, not specific use.

Emphasis mine.

When a story isn't about kittens or a squash that looks like Nixon, there are layers and layers of extra stuff you have to do now, and the best time to think and plan is not, shall we say, when the earth is caving in. When something happens and you don't or can't respond appropriately, you wind up with some kind of totally preventable communications emergency sapping your staff's energy at a time when they're running on fumes anyway. 

Think about removing the ads from your news videos about the event, so that when (as I did yesterday) people are watching the various live feeds trying to get information about people being dead or injured, they're not delayed by commercials for furniture polish. 

Think about the witty error page that pops up when your server's overloaded or is otherwise tits-up. Is that what you want to see when you're frantically looking for news about your loved ones? I get you want to be cute and smart-assy since that's how the Internet works, and ordinarily, bravo, but is there a way to change it when a major breaking news event breaks you? If not, can one be designed? 

Think about turning off your automated tweets, at least for the first few hours of a major national event. This applies to news orgs but also to, you know, everyone. People can read about your band, your store, your company's new HR policy, your local award, tomorrow. It's disconcerting in the extreme to read a hundred tweets about Boston and then, in the middle of it, "HERE'S SOME MEDIOCRE SHIT YOU COULD BUY." "Here's our reporter's charming story about the world's oldest stamp collector." 

Think about not reading random Twitter feeds on the air. That's not a substitute for reporting. It is not that hard to send someone out into the street with a camera to interview people and I guarantee you ten of the people farthest away from the event talking about nothing will make you look more intelligent and sound more informed than reading "tweets from @bootylicious26." This also applies to quoting what people say on Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are useful tools. They are not the job. 

And mostly this applies to live national broadcasters, but: THINK ABOUT SHUTTING UP. If you're going to start a sentence with "we don't know any details yet" then please, don't continue to speak. It would be better to show footage from the scene in silence. Just tell people what you do know. Full stop. Couching and hedging and such don't cover your ass if you're going to then interview a panel of people who think a crisis was engineered by Barack Obama and the ghost of Tim McVeigh working together to overthrow the Illuminati. 

Most people think you can't plan for breaking news, but you can. You can, should and have to think about this sort of thing before the hellmouth opens up and you're scrambling to find your socks. 

A. 

Beef Stroganoff is Rocket Science, Too

So a rocket scientist died, and the New York Times, in some kind of effort to be witty and ironic, led off her obit with this: 

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. 'The world’s best mom,' her son Matthew said.

And it wasn't that we didn't get the joke, it's that it wasn't funny, so when Twitter reacted by mocking the outdated notion that it's somehow incompatible with rocket science to know how to cook (career women being All One Thing, and housewives being All The Other), the editors changed the lede to this: 

She was a brilliant rocket scientist who followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. 'The world’s best mom,' her son Matthew said.

WHICH IS NOT BETTER. I'm glad she was an awesome mom to her kids. That's not nothing, so let's get that out of the way. Of COURSE the kids are going to see her as mom, and it's great she was a good one. But the Times made sure we ALL saw her that way, instead of as this: 

Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

The system became the industry standard, and it was the achievement President Obama mentioned in 2011 in presenting her with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

The article goes on to contrast the work she did with the family she had, as if these two things are totally incompatible and it is a wonder she was able to pull them off, and what an abberration, a lady with kids who still had a brain! I am just about done with women bearing the full brunt of having to answer for the "work-life balance." Just once I'd like to read a story about some prominent Washington asshole who has a bunch of kids where he's asked if being a dad is the most important job he's ever had. Just once I'd like to read something that vaguely shames a fellow for achieving so much while there were little mouths to feed at home. Just once some famous actor clutching an Oscar should give a speech about how he'd give it right back if it meant he could have more time with his kids. 

Just once I'd like us to act as if this stuff is difficult for men to pull off too, because IT IS, and as much as it's unfair to place the entire cultural burden on women, it's equally unfair to act like men who are involved in their families are unicorns. The more we disappear guys like that, the easier it is for everyone to just keep expecting the ladies will do all the work, because it's not like we have examples otherwise. 

Mostly, reading this, I'm just glad I learned to cook, because should I ever accomplish anything worthy of a NYT obit, it'll surely be buried under an assessment of my peach-blueberry pie. 

A. 

Who Will Speak Up for Christianity in an Age of Rampant Girl-on-Girl?

If only it had a champion, such as the Tribune's John Kass: 

I'm not opposed to same-sex unions. Americans have the right to equal protection under the law, and same-sex couples should be able to expect the same tax benefits and other considerations allowed to those of us who are now being called, in some quarters, "opposite-sex couples."

As far as I'm concerned, Americans have the right to do as they please as long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others. America is all about liberty and freedom.

But this all comes now during the season of Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, when Christians are compelled to confront the obligations of their faith.

And while I hear the new moral arguments, about equal rights and equal protection, I've read little about the religious freedom aspects and what the Supreme Court's ruling might mean for houses of traditional worship.

You've read LITTLE? Really? Where have you been? 

And by the by, "opposite sex" is what heterosexual couples have been called since I was a kid. The opposite sex, that isn't a pejorative, unless you make it one in order to feel put upon. 

The federal government has already told religious institutions that run hospitals that they must provide contraceptives to their employees, even if it runs counter to their beliefs. So now, if the government ultimately compels us to describe same-sex unions as marriage, what's next?

No, they've told religious institutions that run hospitals that they must provide COVERAGE for contraceptives to their employees, if they employ large numbers of employees. They don't have to hand out condoms at gunpoint and put the pill in with the W-2s every spring. 

Plus Catholic women are already on this.  Never mind the non-Catholic ones who just want to get jobs. 

As for "what's next," I think the answer is church-mandated man-on-dog. We're only a minute away from that at any time. 

To speak of faith in this context is to invite the charge of bigotry — if not outright, at least by comparison to angry fire-and-brimstone preachers who seem to use the Bible as a lash. Some wield the Old Testament like a cudgel, and avoid the New Testament, in which Christ asked us to refrain from judging and to love our neighbor.

No one with half a brain wants to be thought of as a bigot. But that's what I and others risk as members of a distinct and irritating minority — as traditional Christians in journalism.

No, being a bigot is what invites charges of bigotry. There is nothing in "traditional Christianity" as embodied by Jesus Christ that makes you a bigot. There is much in the politics of traditional Christianity and Roman Catholicism as embodied by its present leaders that makes it glacially slow to change and pathologically quick to conflate religious and secular practice in an effort to hold onto power, but that has absolutely dick to do with Jesus. So to speak. 

As to the minority status Mr. Kass is so quick to claim, nailing yourself to the cross and then bitching that your hands and feet are sore and you're thirsty is not martyrdom, it's self-indulgence. Nobody is going to fire you because you go to church on Sunday or wear a cross. 

Being incoherent and maudlin, on the other hand, should be a dismissable offense: 

It is a world of language and political symbolism, a world where ideas are often framed so that they may lead to inexorable conclusions favored by the dominant culture. In this media world, I sometimes wonder whether the word "sin" has been outlawed by the high priests of journalism for fear of offending one group or another.

So you really WANT to write a column calling all gays sinners, but you're afraid for your job? What? What does this even mean? 

As to the great risk you're running here, Mr. Kass, I'd note you're writing this in a major metropolitan newspaper. You're not exactly preaching in the desert, to the stones. 

Now that the debate has been framed, if I hold to my faith and resist applauding the changes, I'm easily cast as some drooling white cartoon bigot of the Jim Crow era, denying black Americans the right to sit at a lunch counter and have a meal with the white folks.

You know, you can't claim to be the voice speaking up for the unpopular view, and then lament that it is so unpopular and makes you a target for negative attention. I mean, you can, but the rest of us find it exhausting. 

What is also clear is that, given demographic shifts and attitudes, particularly by young people regarding sexuality and family, traditional Christianity is no longer the dominant culture.

It is the counterculture, fast becoming a minority view.

No, opposition to marriage equality is fast becoming a minority view. Christianity is in no danger whatsoever. Mistaking the one for the other is the central problem with this piece. 

And while I struggle with the fast-moving issue of the redefinition of marriage and its effect on our culture and how to reconcile the rights of others and my own religious beliefs, I ask only one thing:

Tolerance.

Remember that word? Tolerance?

Tolerance for those whose faith and traditional beliefs put them in what is fast becoming the minority.

Absolutely no one is breaking down your door demanding you marry another dude. You can go to church without fear of ever having to see two women plighting their troth before the altar. This changes nothing for you, except that you have to deal with losing privilege and impunity to say whatever you please without fear of disagreement.  

That isn't being a "minority." It isn't being persecuted. You long for bastions of traditionalism; well, you have those in your churches. You can go there and feel the comfort you need. And when you say, over and over, that you support gay people having the same rights as everybody else but you are just afraid this will start some kind of pogrom against Christians ... I mean, remember the way the cities of Iowa were in flames for months after the first gay wedding? People were eating their household parakeets to stay alive. It was monstrous. 

Pray, I ask you all, for peace in the Middle West. 

Snark aside, somewhere in this mess is a good column, about the inability of many to articulate the fear of change that strikes us all at one point or another, and how that fear of change can prevent us from being the people we know we should be. I think what Kass is really asking for is not tolerance, but patience. 

Patience with the struggle of people to understand their own faith (and their own religion, and the diferences between the two), to reconcile their childhoold lessons with the consciences God gave them, to grow and change and love each other not just in words and hugs at Christmastime but in actions and rights and responsibilities. 

And if he'd asked for patience, for time to adjust, I'd still respond, and direct him to a fierce and unapologetic proponent of Christianity for some words upon the subject: 

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

There is, you see, a tradition here as well. 

A. 

Update: Whet has more on the utter allergy to facts going on here.

Happy Kerry Photo

THIS MAH BIG PLANE.

In Iraq, we are apparently vaguely disappointed to not be blowing it up anymore: 

Mr. Kerry’s visit to Iraq on Sunday was the first by an American secretary of state since 2009. He came at a time when concerns are growing over Iraq’s role in the crisis in Syria, and when the United States’ influence in Iraq has been dwindling.

The State Department has been sharply reducing its huge presence here, and its diplomats have seemed powerless to affect the course of events on two of Washington’s pressing concerns: Iraqi tolerance for the Iranian weapons shipments to Syria and issuance of arrest warrants for certain Sunni leaders by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government.

The Obama administration has appeared to be less engaged in Iraq in recent months, as it has sought to “normalize” relations, and the Iraqis have distanced themselves from their former occupiers. And there is a sense among many Iraqi officials that the Americans are no longer willing to marshal the influence they still have.

“The Americans are not using claws or teeth,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki’s former national security adviser, said shortly before Mr. Kerry’s visit.

Well, it worked out so wonderfully last time we tried it. I mean, in all seriousness, are we the assholes for blowing up the country and making grand promises and then not doing anything about them? Absolutely. Would continuing to do so actually change anything? Absolutely not, and while I'm not crazy about the idea that we are just gonna forget all about this war until it takes a big karmic bite out of our ass and we go through another round of "why do they hate us" 20 years from now, you tell me what would be the best alternative here. GTFO is the worst policy, except for all the other ones: 

American promises to help shape a stable democracy in Syria have been met with skepticism by some Iraqi officials. In an interview late in 2012, Sheikh Humam Hamoudi, the chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, recalled a visit in September from A. Elizabeth Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. “What she said was that they would educate the Syrians on how to be a democracy,” Mr. Hamoudi said, adding with a hint of sarcasm, “just like what happened in Iraq.”

A. 

The Hip New Craze Sweeping the Nation

And we wonder why the young'uns don't subscribe to newspapers anymore. 

A. 

Someone Else Will Fix Journalism

Virgo, who knows that things around here have been a little too calm and collected lately, sends me this to make me add to the marks on the wall from where the shoes usually land WHEN I THROW THEM: 

L. Gordon Crovitz is the former publisher of the WSJ, who stepped down in 2007, but still writes a column for the paper. Today—not several years ago, but today!—Crovitzasks, "What happens to in-depth reporting in the age of the blog post?"

Real interesting question, L. Gordon. We are salivating to hear the expertise of a man who is a highly paid media industry advisor andboard member of several media companies. Let's jump right to your conclusion:

The tumult in the news industry is driven by declines in advertising revenues. Readers still value news, both light blog posts and in-depth reporting. Some journalism will be unpaid, but the kind that makes a difference-that finds and questions Pol Pots and drug lords-will continue to cost money. We need to find ways of paying for it.

"We need to find ways of paying for it."—the complete proposal of a man who actually co-founded a company dedicated to helping newspapers make money off online readers. (The fact that he is writing vague columns about the problem years later will tell you how successful his company was at solving the problem in question.)

"We" need to find ways of paying for it. Who is we? I wish someone would ask this guy because 9 times out of 10 when someone says we he means somebody else. 

I was at this "future of journalism" panel a few years back, and the panelists were talking about starting their own news sites and working freelance and doing all the stuff that people are doing now in order to tell the stories they care about telling. And some knob in the audience yelled out, "But who pays your rent while you do that?"

JESUS GOD, you do. You do what everybody who wants to do something forever has always had to do and you figure it out on your goddamn own. This isn't me waxing romantic about the noble poverty of the artist, by the way, but I have a day job, until recently had two day jobs, and every week or so I just wish someone would give me like $30,000 so I could just do this all day. Guess what? THAT ISN'T EVER GOING TO HAPPEN. I can sit around for the rest of my life wishing somebody would pay me to do it, or I can do it and find ways of making it work. 

Stuff like the above is not helpful. It's always somebody else's problem. Somebody else always has to step up. Somebody else always has to manage this. And at no point does it occur to any of the comfortably situated loudmouths talking about how great things used to be that if they wanted to, they could solve this problem their own goddamn selves instead of wishing for their handsome prince to come. 

After the last ten years of wittering around about who or what is going to "save journalism" I would hope to God we have finally come to the conclusion that the only people who are going to "save journalism" are the ones who goddamn want to, so can we please quit noticing the water's rising and pick up some buckets and start bailing? The handsome prince is not coming. Maybe a fraction of the dollars spent wondering where he is and how to find him could pay some reporter somewhere. 

A. 

Both Sides Do It

A round-up of depressing reporter laziness on the sequester. I think we should just replace, at this point, all pundits with a parrot we've taught to yell BOTH SIDES DO IT. At least the parrot would be fun to wach. 

Vineland Daily Journal: 

Both sides wrong: Holding sequester in contempt

Rolling Stone and Matt Taibbi, who should know better: 

Sequestration Cuts Crisis Makes Me Want to Strangle Both Sides

NBC News, in a masterpiece of Not Pissing Anyone Off: 

Both sides declare a budget truce -- for now… 

[snip]

After their fifth budget battle in the past two years and after the sequester cuts went into effect on Friday, both sides seemed to wave the white flag and declare a political truce -- for now. 

[snip]

What does this mean? Frankly, both sides have to be politically exhausted. 

[snip]

After some breathing room, after both parties let their budget processes play out, and after evidence that the U.S. economy has been negatively impacted by the sequester, both sides could determine that a Grand Bargain is in their interest ...

Washington Post Wonkbook: 

Are both sides bluffing on the sequester?

KMBZ: 

ABC/Post polling also has found a continued preference for a mix of tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, as well as greater approval for Obama vs. the Republicans in Congress on handling federal spending, as reported in an ABC/Post poll last week. That suggests risk for both sides, but particularly the GOP, if the mood over sequestration cuts turns sour.

Roll Call: 

The point is, Congress has been living with sequestration in one form or another for more than a quarter century. It is irrelevant who originally proposed the latest incarnation. Both parties voted for it with the understanding that across-the-board cuts were so onerous and stupid they would drive both sides to the table to fashion a smart alternative.

Now, both sides are trying to deny paternity.

USA Today, on political polarization in general and not just the sequester: 

A majority on both sides say politics are more divided because both parties have changed: Democrats becoming more liberal and Republicans more conservative.

The Hill, Trent Lott (!!!!) and Tom Daschle: 

Democrats and Republicans today often seem less like respectful political opponents and more like immovable partisan enemies who question one another’s motives and even love of country. Extreme wings of both parties are gaining strength from powerful special interests, creating a deepening ideological divide that makes even routine collaboration rare.

That's it. I'm going back to bed. 

A. 

Damn Right I've Sold Out

For these prices, I'd have said Walmart was not in any way sticky, George W. Bush was the best president we ever had, and ferrets are filthy animals who should be banned from all homes and crack vans. 

Sure, sure, those are opinions I hold anyway, and the money would just be a nice bonus to support my work. If somebody showed up with a huge check, I'd never question it. 

A. 

Power Protects Itself, Always

We devote untold amounts of print to trying to figure out why powerful people are fuckups, and this is the heart of it all: 

The real rap on Woodward isn’t that he makes things up. It’s that he takes what powerful people tell him at face value; that his accounts are shaped by who coöperates with him and who doesn’t; and that they lack context, critical awareness, and, ultimately, historic meaning.

I used to have an editor who made us all change beats every three to six months. It was a pain in the ass, as it didn't let anybody get really good at anything, but the intent was to avoid, even on a small scale, a situation where we began to feel ourselves part of a club that wasn't our own. Because when you start to feel closer to your sources than your colleagues, or worse, start to mix the two up, you do a disservice to your readers. 

Of course, readers are no longer who Woodward is serving, and he hasn't been serving anyone but himself for quite some time. And it shows:

Everybody’s saying now that surely Bob Woodward has gotten harder pushback, more bullying than this. But really? How recently? I think he’s been much more coddled in recent years than people are inclined to admit. 

It's depressing because it's Woodward, but other than that it's entirely predictable. 

A. 

Newspapers Won't Make It By Not Making It

I want to make out with Warren Buffett right now: 

Charlie and I believe that papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly-bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time. We do not believe that success will come from cutting either the news content or frequency of publication. Indeed, skimpy news coverage will almost certainly lead to skimpy readership. And the less-than-daily publication that is now being tried in some large towns or cities – while it may improve profits in the short term – seems certain to diminish the papers’ relevance over time. Our goal is to keep our papers loaded with content of interest to our readers and to be paid appropriately by those who find us useful, whether the product they view is in their hands or on the Internet.

WHAT AN AMAZING CONCEPT. Do what you're good at, and instead of faffing around trying to bet on which thing you're good at will be the most profitable thing, do it all well. And if you're doing something well, your customers will want it and pay for it. Astonishing. It's almost as if that has worked for everyone who has ever made a thing ever. 

Or we could keep doing what we're doing, which is to bitch out current and newly former customers for not loving us enough, cut staff, act like a great newspaper and a great web site and great mobile have to fight it out like fucking roosters in a cage, and talk in the trade press about how journalism has no future and nobody is ever going to love us like we think they used to. 

That's been working out great. 

A. 

The Columbia Journalism Review On The Pillage Of The Picayune

There's an excellent piece in the CJR by Ryan Chittum about how Advance Media is shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's a must, albeit depressing, read story. It makes the Newhouses sound like practitioners of vulture capitalism.  It's an excellent image but they're also latter day carpetbaggers decimating New Orleans' paper of record in favor of the badly designed, user hostile web site that is NOLA.com.

'A Ratings Win'

Win the poop ship, guys.

CNN likely spent in the mid-five figures to cover the event, according to a rough estimate TVNewser put together. A local Alabama helicopter charter company told us a mid-size helicopter would likely cost around $1,000 an hour to rent, while medium-sized boats in the area run a few hundred dollars a day. The rental fees, combined with costs associated with sending staff to Alabama from Atlanta and New York, and fees associated with broadcasting live on location, and it adds up to somewhere in the $30-$50K range.

Journalism is dying because you kids don't read anymore, and you're too busy lining up for iPads to be serious about real news. 

A. 

Only Republicans Can Hold Republicans Accountable

Driftglass notes Andrew Sullivan calling for "someone in the GOP" to "take Bush-Cheney apart," and asks: 

Because, in the end, Mr. Sullivan is simply not intellectually fit or emotionally mature enough to either understand the true heart of American Conservatism or acknowledge the self-evident fact that the Liberals have been right about the Right all along. Instead, Mr. Sullivan pins his hopes on a Wise Conservative Daddy who will come and make it all better.

You know, it's not so much that our discourse is so hopelessly polarized and BOTH SIDES DO IT and how awful and mean everyone is. It's that we've decided disclaimers are more important than facts. If you say something correct about someone, does it matter that that person is of another party?

The facts should be the facts. If I say, for example, that Republican policies lead to outcomes X, Y and Z, as demonstrated by historical fact, all that should matter is whether I am right or wrong. Not where I'm coming from, or what my affiliations are. If I am correct, I am correct whether liberal or conservative. If I am wrong, same deal. 

This would, of course, require a press corps both able and willing to determine those facts, and we currently have a press corps that is neither, and would rather read name tags and tell you which team the player is on than determine the truth of what the player is saying.

That still doesn't explain, however, why Democrats only get the benefit of the doubt when criticizing their own party, as exemplified by Joe Lieberman being on every Sunday show every week forever by talking about how Democrats were horrible. Meanwhile, lawmakers who said Bush was horrible were unserious commie traitors who couldn't be listened to by anyone who wanted Washington street cred.

I'm condensing certain things, of course, but the only major criticism of the GOP given credence comes from the GOP, and even then, the people in the GOP who did speak up were quickly made out to be closet liberals with personal failings anyway, so as to both shut them up and discourage future dissenters. 

I'm not sure what Sullivan thinks will happen if his dream comes true and Bush-Cheney is taken down by some imaginary principled GOP stalwart. I mean, bygones, anyway, and everybody lost their minds after 9/11 also, and are we still fighting that war? Let's look forward, not back. And for God's sake, keep your powder dry. 

A. 

The Last Adults on Earth

You kids, with your Twitterings: 

Perhaps Twitter will evolve into a form of news communication...

It has.

...especially in the developing world, where independent media outlets are rare.

Holy fuck, are you kidding me? You know, maybe one day, this whole social media thing might have an impact in the third world. Maybe in the ARAB world. In the SPRING. TMQ feels comfortable saying that verily, this may pass. See if you can beat that, Nate Silver!

Twitter and similar services seek to recapture the sensation of childhood. When you are little, your parents wanted to know everything happening to you, everyone you spend time with, everything that was said. Once you are an adult, nobody cares about daily details like where you are and what you are talking about. Twitter creates the illusion that not only does someone else care — thousands of people care! Twitter is all about the person sending the tweet, not those who receive it.

TMQ says: Why not tweet a charitable donation instead? Instead all of you are infantilized assholes who NEVER use Twitter for noble purposes. You are sickening. You are ALL children.

I think people Instagramming their food is weird. I don't get it, like, unless it's a thing that's on fire like Baked Alaska or something, or a birthday cake, like why am I looking at your burrito unless it's to feel bereaved because I have no burrito? I don't get the food pics. When I've made something terribly complicated and I'm proud of it, I'll take a picture then, but I know people who are like, I made a peanut butter sammich and here's a photo! Just eat your damn meal. Preferably nowhere near my DAMN LAWN.

You know what, though? The Internet comes with ALL KINDS of options and ways for me to NOT look at Instagrammed food. And Instagram comes with all kinds of ways to not use its service for those purposes. For example, you can help the NYT document a massive snowstorm. Or otherwise use it to get your message out. 

I hate this thing old people do -- and fellow old people, for serious, knock it off -- where we take the stupidest possible use a tool and use that use to declare the tool itself stupid. This is about as savvy as declaring hammers invalid because some people use them to hang pictures of velvet Elvises. It's just a way to stroke ourselves, and while I'm not opposed to that in itself, to quote Easterbrook, nobody else really needs to know all about it. 

A. 

 

Men Suck, And It's Your Fault, Ladies, Because of Babies

You know what has been missing from our discussions about ladies in the workplace? The perspective of a middle-aged white man who thinks bitches be trippin' to have menz babies: 

Look, most grown men are still 12-year-old boys inside. Most men still expect their working spouse to assume responsibility for the household chores. Most men turn immediately to their wives when their kid has the sniffles (“you don’t expect me to miss work, do you?”). Most men raise their eyebrows and give each other a nudge when a good-looking girl appears at a meeting. We check out the way they’re dressed. We’re shocked (still) when they make off-color jokes (she seemed like such a nice girl!). And most men still don’t feel comfortable golfing and drinking with their female colleagues because we can’t make jokes about sex and farting.

First of all, you're not talking about most "grown men." You're talking about the caricature of idiot man-child that the sitcoms of the 90s have tried to convince us is the true picture of most men, a caricature lots of lazy, entitled assholes use to excuse their crappy behavior instead of being grown-ups and taking responsibility for themselves. 

I keep saying this: I HATE THIS FUCKING DODGE THAT MEN ARE CHILDREN OR PETS. Men are not secretly little boys. Men are people. They are insecure, or confident, or good at stuff around the house, or bad at stuff around the house, just like women. Just like everybody. There is no goddamn two-for-one deal in the womb on a penis and a Peter Pan complex. As sick as I am of how this allows lousy shitheels to get away with treating women like dirt, I'm also sick of how it disappears the good men who don't try to make themselves out the intellectual equivalents of a bucket of KFC because herf derf According to Jim. 

(If you're not comfortable drinking and golfing with the chicks in your office, consider why they don't seem comfortable drinking and golfing with you. Possibly they can drink you under the table and don't want to embarrass the boss, and fuck golf, seriously, it's the dumbest thing ever.) 

How could this story get worse, you ask? Oh, just wait, because sometimes dumb bitches who bring themselves to the office to make men feel uncomfortable go and get themselves pregnant, apparently by magic, and men who are not fucking them are not always privy to when this will happen exactly: 

I am not embarrassed to say that when I interview a young woman, my first thought is “what happens when/if she gets pregnant?” This is a legitimate business question. Right or wrong, the fact is that men delegate mothering to women. And most women (thank God) want that job too—it’s natural. So am I wrong to ask if that smart young lady who I’m about to invest in plans to start a family anytime soon and whether she will actually come back to work in six weeks after she gives birth? Or ever? I need to make plans otherwise. Allow me to ask that question. Oh by the way, guys should face the same scrutiny about their “paternity” plans too.

But they never do, do they? Does anyone look at a young man, married or engaged, and start calculating how long he has before he knocks up that pretty girl and starts needing to get home for soccer practices? PLEASE. Men who love their children and want time to participate in those children's lives are like UNICORNS, amirite laydees? Women are just naturally made for that sort of shit, whereas men are made to drink, golf, and talk about sex and farting. 

(If only men participated in creating a pregnancy in some way. If only they had some role in the process, then they might not be so terribly inconvenienced by it all. Like, say they had an appendage, like a penis, and they could choose to use or not use it for its reprodutive purpose. And then, if they insisted on using it, if only there was some way to legally and safely prevent pregnancy, like, say, sheathing that penis in some kind of protective garb.)

If you want to ensure a woman in your employ comes back to work after maternity leave, here's a radical fucking idea: Try to make the job worth coming back to in comparison to an itty bitty human who she likes very much. Try to give her enough paid time off so that she can decide how best to arrange her life around the new person in the house and no, six weeks is not enough time. Try to value her as an employee, as if you know her and care about her well-being. 

Most of all, try not to make out like she's done you a personal wrong by reproducing, unlike a male boss of mine from a few years back, who used to act like women got pregnant to spite him. First of all, fucko was the one making the hiring decisions, and second of all, I sincerely doubt any of the female employees who did get knocked up were thinking of him in their moments of wedded bliss. Sometimes it's not all about you, boss. 

BE A GOOD BOSS, and maybe she will come back. Or she won't, in which case you've lost an employee, and the world will not end, and the earth will keep turning and we'll all get over it someday. 

But hey, maybe it's all hopeless anyway because women are so PRIVATE about this stuff: 

Most women will not become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The numbers already prove that. A significant reason why is that grown, responsible men are still adolescent boys at heart. But it’s not all our fault. Because while we are still prohibited from asking reasonable questions like “do you plan to start a family anytime soon and what impact will that have on my business?” there will always be discrimination in the workplace.

What does this guy think a woman who is being nattered at by an interviewer about pregnancy plans is going to say? WHY YES I PLAN TO GET PREGNANT IMMEDIATELY UPON BEING HIRED. Nobody's gonna say that. And preventing you from asking is not oppressing your freedom to do business. You are not Rosa Parks. Nobody is victimizing you with a nursing bra.

Though after reading that, I certainly wish someone would. 

A. 

CNN: End Of An Error

Hey gang, CNN might be getting palatable again! I say “might” because you never know what fuckery the bean counters have in mind, but it’s hard not to see the exit of Erick Erickson, Mary Matalin, and James Carville as a good sign. 

I gave up on CNN a long, long time ago. Shit like this would piss me off to no end. 

I’d check back with them on occasion, but they always seemed to be working hard at fashioning themselves as a Fox News Lite, down to the revolving door that saw CNN anchors and hosts leave for Fox: Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Bill Hemmer (by the way, I’m sure y’all will be shocked to learn that Erickson is landing at Fox). 

So numerous were CNN’s sins against journalism that I have two pages of blog posts devoted to them. My absolute favorite, if you’ll excuse the blogwhore, was this moment in 2002 when then-CNN anchor Connie Chung berated tennis star (and U.S. citizen) Martina Navratilova for opposing the Iraq invasion. Do give it a look, it’s a shocking display of pro-war propaganda and journalistic malfeasance.

I don’t know what Jeff Zucker has planned for CNN. Will we get more up-to-the-minute breaking news bulletins of “Balloon Boy” stories? Or will CNN be the place for grown-up conversation? Time will tell. 

Mothers and Friends

I write over at Sexy Feminist about the New Mommy War: 

Let’s grant I might have a shorter wait for a child if women were coerced to surrender babies for adoption if those women were young or unmarried or their families disapproved, as was the case once upon a time.

Let’s grant that if Roe v. Wade had gone the other way, things might be easier for me.

And then let’s wrap our heads around this, which Christina Locke seems unable to do: Sometimes it’s not all about me.

My desire for a child isn’t about those other women. My desire for a child does not convey upon them any obligation whatsoever. And their desire not to have a child isn’t about me. How dare I ask them to endure misery so that I can have happiness? How dare I take advantage of their poverty, desperation, frustration, fear? Am I inherently better than them? Do I have any right to expect anyone else’s downfall, just so I can benefit?

No. I don’t. I don’t have any right to ask anything of anyone. Their lives are theirs.

They show you the embryo, you know. They show it to you at my clinic, before what they euphemistically call "the transfer," and then they give you a picture of it. I carried that picture around after the first transfer I had, the one they were so sure was gonna take I started arguing with Mr. A about names and which grandparent would probably be the favorite. I thought it would be fun to show the kidlet someday.

That still doesn't mean any other woman has to feel the same way about an embryo, or a pregnancy. And it doesn't mean I have the right to judge her if she doesn't. It certainly doesn't mean I should write preachy posts for the Times about how much better I am than my abortion-having whore friends.

(Who the fuck DOES that? People think unkind things about their friends all the time. You go home, talk shit to your mother or your partner, and get the snark out of your system. You don't put that snark on the Internet where everyone, INCLUDING THE FRIEND YOU'RE TALKING SHIT ABOUT, can read it. Jesus.) 

There's been some truly spectacular writing this week about the terror of the childless, like this horror about how if you don't want kids, you should have them anyway just in case. No really: 

She doesn’t want to be rushed into having kids (which is why she’s still doesn’t have any) and she’s worried that she doesn’t feel ready. Or worse—what if she finally feels ready at age 46 and it’s too late? What if it’s already too late?

Sometimes Doris reminds me of my kindergartner—“What if I get sick tomorrow and can’t go to school and I never learn to read?” Sometimes Doris reminds me of my toddler twins—wanting whatever toy the other twin has.

"In case I want it later" is a reason to get an extra bag of Oreos at the supermarket. IT IS NOT A REASON TO CREATE ANOTHER HUMAN. This takedown puts it well: 

My point is that maybe Doris really doesn’t want children. Maybe she likes being a career woman, and her fears about having children are justifiable. Maybe the pressure she feels to have children comes from a culture that values mothers, but not middle-aged career women. What Doris might need is support for her feelings. It’s OK to not want children right now, yes, even in this culture where you’re not encouraged to make such a choice as a woman. I’d like to think you and Doris could make different choices and still respect one another. But I also think she needs to find a new friend. 

Jesus, yes. This isn't so much about mom versus not-mom as it is about us all needing to leave each other the fuck alone. Your abortion isn't about my desire to have a child. My job isn't about your stay-at-home motherhood. We are all just trying to get through our weeks without killing each other. We are not intentionally designing our lives to make others feel bad.

And as hard as it can be to not judge others, it's even harder to not judge yourself in comparison, and then turn that judgment outward, so that everyone who isn't you is wrong. But if you want to live in the world we have, which in our ideal imaginings would allow every woman the freedom to make the choices best for her, you have to let some of the mommy war go. Put off your armor, because there isn't a fight here, except the one you make. 

A. 

If Jesus Says He Loves You, Check It Out: Manti Te'o, Faith, and Journalism

From Deadspin's continuing coverage of the Manti Te'o sitch, something that actually interests me about it:

suitwearer 5 days ago Colin Cowherd (or however the fuck he spells it) this morning said that the fact Te'o is "a man of faith" means it was reasonable for the press to not pursue this story, despite the inconsistencies. What does that mean and why does it make me so annoyed?

Drew Magary @suitwearer 5 days ago Because he's a fucking moron. The idea that having an open faith makes you a more reliable person is stupid. And with Cowherd still employed, it's proof that you aren't gonna see much change in how sports or covered. The media isn't gonna stop offering you this sentimental dogshit. They'll just steamroll through and keep offering the same terrible product they always do.

I don't know who first figured out that muttering AS JESUS SAYS after every piece of stupid shit that pops out of your mouth made people afraid to question you, but I'd like to buy that public relations genius a beer and ask just how he came up with the idea.

(It probably was one of the disciples. Probably Paul. Paul was a dick.)

We give a ridiculously wide berth to "people of faith" already. We let them define faith however, which is why assbuckets like Bill Donohue can act like God's Perpetually Snippy Receptionist and dole out who gets what paperclips from the drawer that day, because there's no law saying he's not a Catholic just because he's a gigantic douche. We place no requirements on anyone "of faith" to demonstrate that faith whatsoever, absenting Democrats who happen not to want the state to regulate childbearing. All you have to do to be a "person of faith" is say that you are. Maybe put a plaque of some kind up during your interview.

It's not like you have to show a diploma, after all. I got ordained on the Internet a few years ago and married some friends of mine (best idea ever, by the way, if anyone asks you DO IT) so technically I could set up shop in a storefront and start holding services. Technically I could do that anyway, provided I met zoning restrictions and whatnot. We let people do that, in America, be whoever they say they are. In most religions, the process of becoming a member is pretty loose. Hell, the process of becoming a LEADER is pretty loose. Again, Bill Donohue.

Part of that agreement to live and let live, though, should be not allowing people to use their professed faith as a bludgeon. If we are all who we say we are, then we all meet on equal ground. You don't get a pass because you wave a crucifix around, and I don't get a pass because I face east at dawn. We all should be required to live up to the same standards of truthfulness, generally non-assholish behavior, and character in action. We should all be subject to the same stringent examinations of our histories and stories. We shouldn't be able to just sing some hymns and make all that inconvenient scrutiny go away.

As a "person of faith" (the First Church of Athenae is just be scotch and Galactica re-runs, so consider yourselves all converted) I'm insulted by the idea that because I can quote chapter and verse, I somehow have LESS work to do to prove myself in the world. I should have MORE. I shouldn't be able to say, well, Jesus gives me strength (Jesus has been bugging me lately about coming over "just to talk," for those tracking our soap opera) and everything you were about to ask about why I was a bitch to you that time flies right out of your head. That's ridiculous. I am just as accountable for my actions as any atheist, as any agnostic, as anyone of any "faith" and I resent the concept that I should be treated delicately.

So the idea that it was "reasonable" for reporters not to question Te'o's story (I think maybe they should refrain from covering these guys like the E True Hollywood Story every damn year but that's me and I have no love for college football) because Te'o was religious is insane. If faith gives us all so much strength, then bring it on, fuckers. Ask the toughest questions. Pick over every detail. God's here for me.

I think people didn't question the Te'o story because it was an easy, pre-set narrative that sounded good and we're all on deadline. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by laziness and stupidity. But the idea that people of faith are inherently trustworthy is a lazy, stupid narrative too, and it's past time we threw it out and started approaching every story from the same standard of skepticism, no matter what god a football player worships.

A.

Republican Opposition is Democrats' Fault

Because of course it is: 

LIASSON: In the end, the biggest obstacle to Mr. Obama's gun violence bills might be Republican opposition, but right now the biggest hurdle is a lack of enthusiasm on the part of his own Democrats. Asked for his reaction to the president's proposals, Republican House Speaker John Boehner said he would wait to see what the Senate - and its Democratic leader, Harry Reid, does first.       

JOHN FEEHERY: The number one impediment to actual action on gun control has been Harry Reid.

LIASSON: John Feehery is a former House Republican leadership aide.

YOU DON'T FUCKIN' SAY. 

Also, I like how the first sentence is a bald-faced statement that Democrats are standing in the way, which is supported by Republicans saying that Democrats are standing in the way. BOTH SIDES DO IT! Nobody's really at fault, and therefore no one can be blamed, and therefore nobody will scream about bias, or everybody will which is basically the same thing. 

And IS it a lack of enthusiasm, Democrats, that is preventing you from magically taking away everybody's guns and turning us into a nation of hippies? 

LIASSON: Reid has said he isn't inclined to schedule votes on proposals - like an assault weapons ban - that have little chance of passing the House. 

So it's not a lack of enthusiasm, but that Republicans won't pass anything and Harry Reid knows it. 

Oh, really, what's the difference? 

A. 

I Couldn't Do It Therefore Nobody Can

Yet another subgenre of new media and journalism coverage that makes me fucking crazy. 

Mike Fourcher, who served as Journatic editorial director for a few months last year, is quitting his three-year-old Chicago neighborhood blog, Center Square Journal, and offering it to anyone who wants to run it as a non-profit.

“The economics just aren’t there for a set of stand-alone neighborhood news sites in Chicago,” he writes. “They need a sponsor and a different kind of community support since I’m moving on to a new project. More on that another time.” (Three Chicago neighborhood online news sites make up Fourcher’s Brown Line Media company.)

First of all, way to make me want to buy your thing, telling me there's no way it'll ever make money. Nonprofits need to make money, too. See also every not-for-profit ever. 

Second, define "make it." Profitable? How profitable? Plenty of people look at profitable newspapers as failing if they're less profitable than they were years ago. Profitable enough to pay salaries for five people? Ten people? One person? What are the parameters? How realistic are they? 

I'm not making fun, I'm saying we keep hearing these broad pronouncements and they seem to disqualify everything based on one person's experience. People are trying stuff. It's a little early to give up. Three years makes a media source an infant. How much time are you given before we all go home and the sky falls and hyperlocal is over? 

Plus, Journatic? FAIL. 

A.  

Ride Glenn's Bologna Pony

And other family-friendly amusements at Glenn Beck's new Rand-Land: 

Glenn believes that he can bring the heart and the spirit of Walt's early Disneyland ideas into reality. Independence, USA wouldn't be about rides and merchandise, but would be about community and freedom. The Marketplace would be a place where craftmen and artisan could open and run real small businesses and stores. The owners and tradesmen could hold apprenticeships and teach young people the skills and entrepreneurial spirit that has been lost in today’s entitlement state.

[snip]

Across the lake, there would be a church modelled after The Alamo which would act as a multi-denominational mission center. The town will also have a working ranch where visitors can learn how to farm and work the land.

Working this in reverse order, I don't think people are prevented from setting up an agrarian Galt-paradise of their very own from a lack of knowledge about how to "work the land." I think it has to do with how farming is a quick path to OMGBROKE.

Also, the church will be modelled after The Alamo? So Mexicans will invade it eventually? I'm okay with this.

ALSO I'm kind of having a hard time believing in the ability to build a whole new Galt's Gulch theme park when Beck can't even hire a copy editor for his own web site.

What rides would YOU like to see in this independent community paradise?

A.

If Only There Was Still Money in Journalism

Oh, the good old days of 20FUCKING12.

Eventually we may be right — the sky will fall and the business will collapse — but for the time being, the sky over traditional media is blue and it’s raining green.

In the last year, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 13.4 percent, which was a significant advance, but legacy media giants like Comcast, News Corporation and Time Warner absolutely surpassed it in terms of share price.

Viacom, which has had serious ratings trouble with MTV and Nickelodeon, still managed to be up 16.1 percent on the year. We keep hearing how traditional networks are getting clobbered, but Viacom’s sibling, CBS, was up a whopping 40.2 percent.

I don't know how long I need to go on saying it, but there's plenty of money in media companies. They just don't want to spend any of it on the goddamn news they like to claim they love so much, and it's all the fault of you kids with your Kindles and such. Stop ruining everything, Internet! 

A. 

What's The Worst Thing Ever, Tom Friedman?

Why, it's giving poor people health care and taking care of them when their homes are flattened by nature, of course: 

What world are we living in? It’s a world in which we face three major challenges: responding to the merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, which is changing every job and workplace; dealing with our mounting debt and entitlement burdens, driven by steadily rising health care costs and unsustainable defined benefits; and, finally, developing energy sources that can grow the world economy without tipping it into disruptive climate change. (At one point last week, the Senate approved a $60.4 billion aid package to help New York and New Jersey recover from Hurricane Sandy. If fully implemented, that would mean we’d spend on one storm all the new tax revenue for next year that the House and Senate just agreed to in the fiscal-cliff negotiations.)

Emphasis mine, because is there anything worse than spending on such things? And "debt" by itself is defined as just terrible, regardless of what it's for. In fact, the MOST HORRIFYING EXAMPLE OF SPENDING EVER is aid to New York and New Jersey, which is just SO MUCH MONEY. So much. It's almost a WHOLE QUARTER of two wars we aren't winning, the costs of which Tom Friedman could not give two shits about, because suck on this. 

And why can't we solve this horrible problem? Because Obama isn't bold enough to boldly propose boldly slashing Social Security and Medicare, boldly: 

When I heard Obama say, after the election, that this time he was going to take his plan to the country, and not make the mistake again of just negotiating with Congress, I thought, “Great, I can’t wait to hear what he says.” But all he took to the country was a plan for increasing taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” There was nothing comprehensive, nothing bold, no great journey for America and no risks for him. 

If there's one thing that carries no risk in America, it's attacking rich people. I mean, it's not like they then turn around and spend squillions on trying to get somebody else elected in his place, amirite? 

He took to the country a plan to curb rising health care costs by trying to get everybody some health insurance and for the first time regulate an entirely unregulated industry, but that didn't have the words BOLD AND COMPREHENSIVE in glitter puffy stickers on the cover, so Friedman just assumed it didn't count. 

Maybe Obama has a strategy: First raise taxes on the wealthy, which gives him the credibility with his base to then make big spending cuts in the next round of negotiations. Could be. But raising taxes on the wealthy is easy. Now we’re at the hard part: comprehensive tax reform, entitlement cuts, radical cost-saving approaches to health care and new investments in our growth engines. 

Yeah. It was so easy the Republicans almost detonated the whole country over it. 

And now Obama has to do something really hard. He has to grit his teeth and kick old poor people. That takes major courage. Not like confronting powerful people with rooms full of gold in which they dive like Scrooge McDuck. A kindergartener could fuck those people up. Radical "cost-saving" takes real balls. 

I swear I don't know what Friedman's freebasing these days but I'd like some of it. 

A. 

Krauthammer's Pork Rape

A gentle reminder that hundreds of newspapers pay this man for his syndicated column, while the journalism industry as a whole whines that there is no money for journalism anymore. 

"I think what Boehner did in postponing the vote until today was absolutely right," he said on "Special Report." "That was a rape of the Treasury. $60 billion, including a ton of pork. The part that was essential that passed today was to replenish the flood insurance. That's right, and the rest ought to be debated in regular order."

First of all, you know what is like rape? Rape. Everything else? Not like rape. Like something else. It's not a complicated rule. I'm not an abnormally bright girl so if I can learn this, Charles Krauthammer certainly should be able to grok it eventually. 

Second, and this offends me just as much: A ton of pork. To do trivial things like rebuild people's houses and, you know, FEED THEM. This is pork to some privileged Washington asshole who's never going to miss a meal because a hundred years ago he said something intelligent and they've been paying him to say stupid shit ever since. 

A. 

A Thousand Dollars

For Jenny McCarthy, kids: 

Dear Jenny :

I was married for 21 years and got divorced in January 2011. I'm having a tough time dating and hope you can give me some help.

- Norm from Wheaton

Jenny says: Oh man, Norm. I feel ya. I know exactly what you are going through. I was married for seven years and then jumped into a relationship for another five. When I was finally free, I was scared. I didn't know how to date. I would meet someone and stay with them for five to seven years just so I didn't have to go on any dates.

Now I'm proud to say I've turned into a date-aholic. So you asked the right person, my friend.

Or, some might say, you've asked exactly the wrong person. But it gets better.

The first thing you need to do is hang out where single people are. If you are young, it's the clubs.

Um, read closer, Jenny. He was married for 21 years. So not young. Also: Lives in Wheaton. So, no clubs.

This is the kind of value we place on journalism these days: 

Each minor celebrity receiving a $1,000 check from the Sun-Times has agreed to donate the money to charity. McCarthy has given hers to Generation Rescue, which bills itself on its website as "Jenny McCarthy’s autism organization." Generation Rescue is engaged in the important scientific work of raising questions about whether childhood vaccinations cause autism, which they don't.

Regardless of whether they donate those checks to charity, it's still money the Sun-Times is out, and when they first announced their lineup of "celebrity" columnists there were 30 of them. In other words, $30,000, or the cost of a beginning reporter's salary for a year. Or a shitload of freelance investigation money. 

As a comparison, when I worked for a Sun-Times property as a columnist back in the day, I made $150 a column AT MOST. That number dropped steadily over the years. I can't complain too much, really. I wasn't a celebrity, after all. Maybe if I'd gotten a dye job and tried to kill a bunch of people, I could have commanded a higher price. 

Tell me again about how traditional journalism's decline is all the fault of kids who don't read the news enough and only care about their iPods. 

A. 

Save Traditional Journalism!

I swear, there are days I wonder what exactly I'm supposed to be mourning, when idiots like this are at the head of the class. 

Decent journalists should turn away from Gregory in the street. Had we all started shunning morons long ago, we most likely wouldn't be forced to defend ourselves from all comers quite so hard now. 

A. 

Going New York Postal

I didn't see this until today but I had to share. The NRA actually got bad pub from the Murdoch Press. All I can add is, Holy Shit:

That Was the Year I Knew the Panic Was Over

I keep reading things like this and thinking well, the problem is offices in another goddamn state making decisions about what the local papers need and should be doing: 

In Cleveland, as elsewhere, there is a movement to replace some of the basic accountability function of the newspaper with a nonprofit investigative venture. But the venture in Cleveland is just getting organized and only a few of its counterparts in other cities have so far showed the ability to scale up to the size necessary to have a real impact. "Obviously we can’t fill the gap of a daily newspaper," said Lori Ashyk, one of the Cleveland organizers. Cleveland also has an alt-weekly, and an outfit called MedCityNews covers the city's burgeoning health sector. But it doesn't yet have the kind of alternative online sources for daily schools or crime coverage that have been springing up in some larger cities, such as Philadelphia and Washington.

As I see it, part of the solution is going to have to come from outside these cities—from the national media capitals. Even as coverage has been withering in the provinces, it's been expanding in the Acela Corridor, where the likes of Bloomberg, Reuters, Politico and the National Journal/Atlantic empire are vying to provide the most granular coverage of the Beltway and Wall Street. This coverage is surely nearing the saturation point, especially given how much of the real business and political action is happening out in Real America. Which means that the big Beltway players may start to realize that their competitive advantage will lie in doing a better job of covering Cleveland and Columbus and Lansing and Austin and Tallahassee and Chicago. Heck, they might even hire some of those laid off local reporters who know the lay of the land, and where the bodies are buried, and whether a governor's claims about anti-union legislation hold up to scrutiny.

What will take its place? What ever has? Why do we think a hundred years is forever? Why do we think that just because for years there was one paper and that one paper shouldered all the responsibility that if that one paper disappears all is lost? I'm not saying what's happening here isn't devastating. It's also not the end, because here's the thing about people: They will get the word out any way they have to, while we sit around debating how they do it and OMG WHAT IT ALL MEANS. 

I personally think the answer is a combination of nonprofit shops, independently owned papers, digital services, and maybe an expansion of TV coverage. But all of those things require investment, and they require investment from the (relatively) wealthy media stars who like to bitch all day long that nobody values the news anymore. I like Connie Schultz's husband a whole lot, and she's written some fine and funny things herself, but this comment from her makes me rage-y: 

...The union kid in me has felt for some time that we had to learn how to become activists for journalism. We were so used to reporting the hell out of a story and then assuming everyone would value our hard work, our judgment, our take on things. Some of that was arrogance born of habit, to be sure, but there was a humility in that, too. Fewer hotshots, more team players, producing the kind of journalism that comes about when you don't spend every day trying to prove that you're the smartest person in every room. But we should have started promoting the brand years ago. Journalists — certainly Guild members at The Plain Dealer — were discouraged from doing so, but, honestly, we too often turned a withering eye to those who got special attention for their talents. Old story, that one. Newsrooms are tough places. 

Well, if only you had been in a position to do something about it instead of lamenting it now. Maybe you were a little too busy complaining about college graduates with degrees and online comments and how nobody was really really real anymore like in the old days.

A. 

Black Friday

I think I said this last year, but I find the bitching about Black Friday to be almost as tiresome as Black Friday itself. Go shopping if you want to go shopping, but honestly, the carping about how awful it all is just smacks of classism to me. Herf derf, lookit the stoopid poor people trying to get a cheap TV, how dare they?

Um, well, stores are handing out hot chocolate to people in line and advertising "door buster" sales, and allowing people to camp on their property weeks in advance, so you'll pardon me if I reserve my contempt for the people selling the shit and creating the dangerous situation in the first place. 

And the coverage never fails to make me stabby. Here we are, Bob, standing outside a Wal-Mart to interview crazed shoppers, just hoping somebody gets trampled to death for the tail end of November sweeps. It just encourages bad behavior that we can then all soberly deplore in editorials a day later. How's about you stop covering it like it's fucking D-Day? And by the by if I read one more asshole comment about how Kids Today just don't stand in line for anything that matters, I will take hostages. 

Kids Today, and people today, are in fact better than we think they are: 

What is at times overlooked is that Occupy Wall Street was always about mutual aid. The most shared images were of protests and pepper sprays, but the scene in Zuccotti was a common kitchen, a free library, shared living space, a medical tent and endless conversations in which people listened to and learned from each other as they modeled a mutually invested society as an alternative to the culture of Big Corporations…and Big Government. Had OWS found a way to make mutual aid its loudest message, it may have found even more followers from the start.

A. 

Malaka Of The Week: Walter Shapiro

Athenae took a whack at the veteran hack, Walter Shapiro earlier in the week. It's my turn to play whack-a-hack by making Shapiro malaka of the week. Shapiro is a competent political reporter who has been around the block a time or three but he 's also one of the avatars of the Beltway conventional wisdom, which means that he's nuts for Senator Walnuts and that's why he wrote this tripe:

Before the initials CIA came to stand for Covert Intimate Affairs, the battle over the next secretary of state would have been the main event of post-election November. Normally, it doesn’t get better than a brand-name Washington struggle pitting the newly reelected president against the Republican senator he defeated in 2008 over filling the Cabinet post soon to be vacated by an ex-president’s wife. 

Barack Obama’s ill-camouflaged inclination to name Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, as Hillary Clinton’s successor would normally be about as contentious as, well, a confirmation hearing for David Petraeus in 2011. Rice, an undersecretary of state in the Clinton administration, has by most accounts performed well in a job that pivots around the micro-wording of Security Council resolutions rather than grand geopolitical visions.

But all that good will evaporated when Rice, drawing the short straw as Obama’s designated foreign-policy spinner, dutifully made the rounds of the Sunday shows on Sept. 16, five days after the Libyan attacks. Repeating the White House line, Rice argued that, based on “the best information,” a “spontaneous protest” outside the American consulate in Benghazi attracted heavily armed “extremist elements” who murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. 

In John McCain’s splenetic view, Rice’s TV commentary smacks of a White House cover-up, since subsequent reporting has shown that initial accounts of a triggering protest were incorrect. As McCain put it Wednesday on Fox News, threatening to filibuster the nomination, “Susan Rice should have known better and if she didn’t know better, she is not qualified.”

All of this shit has largely been discredited by McCain's overweening malakatude when he skipped a briefing about what happened at Behghazi in order to go on teevee to complain about being kept in the dark about what "really" happened. It led to this classic Walnutty moment:

 

Sorry for posting dipshit Wolfie but this was a classic Walnuts temper tantrum. Malakas like Walter Shapiro would *never* dare to pose such an impertinent question to Saint McCain whose inconsistencies are treated like charming idiosyncrasies. The only thing I find charming about Senator Walnuts is his daughter, Meghan.

The oddest thing about Shapiro's piece is that he doesn't *really* believe McCain's conspiratorial bluster but he thinks it could kill Rice's chances:

As should be obvious, the U.N. ambassador has nothing directly to do with embassy security, American covert operations in the Middle East or the flow of intelligence about terrorism. All Rice was doing in her television appearances on September 16 was reciting from talking points presumably prepared by the White House national security team based on information provided by the CIA and other agencies. According to reporting by Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius, the CIA was still clinging to its belief that the Benghazi attacks began with a spontaneous protest when Rice made her ill-fated rounds of the Sunday shows.

So, Mr. CW agrees that Ms. Rice was using CIA talking points but that Obama should duck a fight over a possible nomination because otherwise McCain will hold his breath until he turns blue? Sheesh.

I don't know about you but I like the new look Democratic leadership style. Both the Prez and Leader Reid seem ready to kick ass and take no prisoners after the election. They've been as feisty as hell and I think it rocks. Mind you, I think John Kerry should be Secretary of State BUT if the Big O wants Susan Rice, he should fight for her and it looks as if he will. He seems to have learned something important from the Denver debate debacle: people love a fighter, the MSM may not but the people do.

Walter Shapiro is essentially a stand-in for the longstanding malakatude of the MSM punditocracy. It's time for them to kiss-off Senator Walnuts and his diminutive sidekick, Lindsey Graham, but that's unlikely. The CW will continue to see them as "moderates" but I think that McCain should zip his lip and zip up his pants because his Grumpy Old Man/Walter Matthau routine isn't wearing very well, and the idea of casting Graham in the Jack Lemmon role makes we want to, uh, retch up my rice...

Obama's Massive Victory Means Obama is Hosed

First, the credentials for the following stupidity: 

Walter Shapiro's Yahoo! News column examines what we know about the character and personalities of the 2012 candidates. Shapiro, who is covering his ninth presidential campaign, is also a special correspondent for the New Republic.

Wow, what a pedigree. I bet he's got some seriously interesting things to say about how Obama will govern: 

Dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 failure to bring the United States into the League of Nations, second presidential terms have almost always been disappointing and sad. There have been successes: Ronald Reagan passing tax reform in 1986 and Bill Clinton balancing the budget. But far more common are thwarted ambitions, scandal and a slow slide towards political irrelevance. 

“This time it’s different” would be the likely response from Obama’s true believers. And these acolytes could be correct since historical patterns are merely suggestive rather than Marxist Iron Laws. 

In other words, here is some stuff that might happen. Or it might not! The world is unpredictable! Pay me my golden ducats! 

No modern president has been immune from scandal in his second term. Unless history has failed us completely, the sagas of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton do not require elaboration. 

I have never ever met anyone who wanted to give Nixon a blowjob. 

George W. Bush came close to hitting 25 percent approval in the waning days of his presidency partly because of an aura of incompetence dating back to the heck-of-a-job-Browniefederal response to Hurricane Katrina.

An aura of incompetence. Wow. What color was it? Did it glow? 

Or, you know, Bush's approval sucked because of ACTUAL INCOMPETENCE that got thousands of people dead. Plus he started a couple of wars America decided were bullshit, and then the economy imploded. Little things. 

Given Obama’s heavy reliance on drone attacks, perhaps the most relevant cautionary lesson comes from a beloved second-term president. It was stubborn resistance to congressional oversight and impatience with the stodgy norms of national-security decision-making that led to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Iran-contra scandal. 

Right. See, Reagan had to orchestrate that clusterfuck because of "stodgy norms" and how Congress kept checking his homework. So rude. 

The Petraeus love triangle (or was it a rhombus?) is a reminder that a president cannot know everything about his appointees. It also underscores the dangers inherent in erecting marble statues for esteemed public officials prematurely. 

Obama built Petraeus a statue? Where is it? I think we should lay boxes of condoms at its feet and pray to it for virilty. 

After six years of anyone in the White House (even FDR or Reagan), the act begins to grow stale and voters crave a different kind of change. 

The act. You know, that little entertainment routine known as BEING THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD. 

What this means is that Obama probably has until the summer of 2014 to operate with maximum political leverage. After the 2014 congressional elections, he may begin to experience the first debilitating signs of lame-duckism. By the summer of 2015, Americans may find the early skirmishing for the presidential nomination more riveting than the seventh year of the Obama presidency.  

Surely it won't be the vaunted political press, above such trivial matters, that will be sick of all this boring-ass governance bullshit by then, and creating self-fulfilling prophecies about when "maximum political leverage" will be exhausted, as if it's a bowl of sugar or something. 

Maybe by the summer of 2015 all these idiots will be retired. 

A. 

Watcha Gonna Do When the Money Runs Out?

I've said for years that Roger Ailes would have been a firebreathing liberal if there had ever been half a buck in it for him: 

Roger Ailes is as paranoid, hysterical and deluded as Jack Welch, but he does grasp that this is unsustainable. He fired Glenn Beck and replaced him with a dumb panel show because he knew Beck was going too far to be useful. “The Nightly Apocalyptic Death Cult Report” is decent for ratings and great for buzz but it doesn’t help Republicans win elections, or at least doesn’t help them remain able to win many elections in the long term.

Pundits and people with books to hawk spend a lot of time purporting to explain the wingnut mindset, which is a long way 'round of describing the way your dog can't do math. Fox Republicans don't have values, they have brand loyalties, which is why they're so fact-free. You can make an objective argument to me about why your football team is better, you could make me watch while they win the Super Bowl in front of me, but you will never, ever convince me that the Bears don't suck. 

They're Republicans because liberals blow, full stop, and that's all you need to give them. 

Trouble is, it's not where the money is. The money is in being an effective thief, not in cheering on Willie Sutton from the sidelines. The pundits that helped build your brand by pretending you were one of them are working for dying media outlets publishing conventional wisdom that's neither. A majority of the electorate is over your bullshit. So now what do you do? 

A. 

It Was Good Fun While It Lasted, Our Media Experiment

Oh have a little pride, for fuck's sake: 

So as part of a story online about the polls on Saturday, NBC News senior political editor Mark Murray included a section essentially imagining if the findings of his organization’s own poll were altered in a way that showed the Democratic sample in Ohio cut in half. In that case, Murray wrote, Obama’s lead would shrink to three points.

In an email to TPM late Saturday, Murray explained his reasoning behind it.

“We anticipated that there would be criticism of a D+9 sample, and asked our pollsters to assume — as an exercise — what the race would be simply if you halved that Democratic Party ID advantage,” Murray wrote. “We decided to publish that information in my story (towards the end, mind you). But make no mistake: The numbers are the numbers, and we stand by them.”

Criticizing pollsters for allegedly oversampling Democrats has become a cottage industry on the right. Over at National Review Online, Josh Jordan on Saturday referred to Marist’s polling as an “in-kind contribution to Obama.”

Let's go out of our way to make the wingnuts feel better. That'll fix everything. Surely then they'll stop calling you traitors and criticizing your coverage and basically making it out like your personal mission in life is to ruin their fun. If you give them just this one thing, if you throw them a bone, they'll stop slavering and snarling around your door. That always works. 

I swear to ... look, is there some value in saying yes, in fact, even if we "unskew" the polls the way you anti-intellectual freakjobs want them unskewed, Obama still wins Ohio so fuck off? Probably. But the point is that by doing that in a news story you're writing for your critics and not for the facts. You're writing to head something off, not to tell people what's going on. 

And by the fucking bye, there are worse things than a bunch of wingnuts calling you an asshole. I know they're annoying and I know they're loud right now, but if all it takes is loud and annoying to make editors and news directors do what you want them to do why hasn't Matt Lauer been fired and forced to stand in Times Square covered in bees? 

A. 

The Christie Conspiracy?

There is no such thing but the wingnuts are good at dreaming them up, and since I just visited the alternate reality that is Politico, I feel vaguely conspiratorial. Btw, Politico is hyping a poll that claimed that Mittbot could win Minnesota. Really? A state that the Dems have carried in 13 of the last 14 Presidential elections? Sheesh. Talk about an implausible feint: Pennsylvania, at least, elected a buncha Goopers in 2010 but the Gopher State elected a Democrat Governor during that teadwad landslide election. Yumpin' yiminy, they must think we're stupider than the love child of Palin and Bachmann or something...

Back to Chris Christie. The wingnut punditocracy and their enablers in the MSM, are convinced that he has some devious neo-Machiavellian reason to "embrace" Obama after Frankenstorm Sandy. First of all, does anyone believe that Christie is subtle and devious? He's as subtle as a ballpeen hammer upside your head and as devious as Red (You're a dumbass) Forman, the misanthropic father from That 70's Show. I take him at his word that he's doing it for his state. As Dr. A-who spent a lot of time on Long Guyland in her youth-said to me earlier today: "People from Jersey love it because everyone else thinks it's a hellhole." I married well.

In another clear indication that they're losing, the Romneyites have "revealed" to Politico that Christie was Mittbot's first choice but he soured on him. What is he, a jawbreaker? Do they even have those anymore?

Some aides around Romney began to sour on Christie when he was late to a couple of events where they were appearing together. “Chris is a sort of cavalier New York, New Jersey guy: ‘If I’m a few minutes behind, I’ll blame it on traffic,’” said a person who knows him well. “That’s just who he is.”

The tardiness rankled the by-the-book folks around Romney. As the vice-presidential selection ramped up, Christie was always at the top of the list, but always with an asterisk.

Some Romney loyalists thought he was too much about himself.

“He wouldn’t make a good Number Two,” one adviser said. That is a point that Christie often made himself, when brushing off talk that he would be chosen.

Advisers also fretted about the raw emotion that makes Christie so popular on TV and on the trail, fearing it might be a liability in the West Wing. In blunt language that Christie can appreciate, another official said: “The explosiveness had some risk.”

I'm surprised that they didn't pile on by calling him emotionally unstable and a compulsive eater. This reminds me of all the stories leaked to Politico by the McCainiacs about Palin when it became obvious that they were going to lose. Such a story is far more revealing than fake-ass  campaign stops in Pennsylvania.

My favorite Christie conspiracy theory comes from the Breitbartian bozo, Joel Pollack:

But the truth about Christie’s outreach to Obama is blindingly obvious: Mitt Romney is now running away with this election, freeing Christie to praise the president without fear that doing so will tip the scales.

The only thing that is blindingly obvious is Pollack's malakatude and utter douchebaggery. That's got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life. Hmm, maybe Pollack is the love child of Palin and Bachmann? Stranger things have happened.

I'll let some of Chris Christie's constituents have the last word because pretty soon the Romney campaign will be only a memory and a bad one at that:

 

Obama Is Winning Which Still Means He's Losing Because Romney has Hope

HORSE RACE: 

Polling shows the race remains a toss-up heading into the final days. But Romney still has the tougher path; he must win more of the nine most-contested states to reach 270 electoral votes: Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Hampshire.

So it's a toss-up, except for the insurmountable odds Romney faces. Good to know. 

Friday also offered an economic finale to the campaign with the release of October jobs reports that contained better than average economic news but gave both campaigns a talking point.

They both had a talking point! Oh my God, you guys! There's no way of knowing who was right about what the jobs report meant, because they both had talking points! 

In crucial early voting, Obama holds an apparent lead over Romney in key states. But Obama's advantage isn't as big as the one he had over John McCain four years ago, giving Romney hope that he could make up that gap in Tuesday's election.

In all nine states? But hey, the TWO AP reporters it took to write this fact-free pile of nonsense aren't actually saying Romney could make up that gap, only that he's been given hope. He can hope for stuff now. I'm sure he's relieved to hear it. 

The real reason all these people are so fucking pissed off at Nate Silver is he's taken away their ability to put out shit like this and call it journalism of any kind. 

A. 

Another Blogger Ethics Panel

It's always time for one. 

A. 

Hurricane Sandy: Politico is All Over the Important Shit

Nature is currently trying to kick the shit out of an entire half of the country, and it's time for the big question: 

1) Will Mitt Romney’s momentum be stopped?

It’s hard to see how the storm helps. The Republican nominee has more than closed the gap with the incumbent over the final weeks of the campaign, taking a slim lead in most national polls. But his national boost hasn’t been mirrored in two pivotal states: Ohio and Virginia. Already Romney had to scrap a full day’s worth of events in Virginia Sunday.

Obama has had to change his schedule, too, but he’s not the one trying to make up ground.

And even though there are multiple schools of thought on how Sandy could affect voters’ feelings about the candidates or the nuts and bolts of getting folks to turn out, it’s still hard to see how the storm could help Romney. That is, unless the government botches the response and voters blame Obama.

Let's be clear about this: If government botches the response, voters should blame Obama. Also, please kill me quickly. It's hard to see how the storm would help Romney? That's because THE STORM ISN'T ABOUT ROMNEY. It's about how lots of people are getting their asses kicked and New York is going full zombie apocalypse and we have long lists of folks who are basically being reduced to Little House on the Prairie-style living for who knows how the fuck long. But hey, don't let's let that interfere with your need to make everything about OMFG HORSE RACE! 

Speaking of which:

2) Does Obama have a natural advantage because he’s president?

It is so rude of Hurricane Sandy to make Obama look good by being in a particular chair at this particular time. So unfair to Republicans. 

The short answer: yes. The longer answer: not if he makes an unforced error. While George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina ranks among the worst blunders in modern presidential history, it has also ensured that no president or candidate will under-react to the threat of a devastating natural disaster.

SO IT WAS A WIN, AFTER ALL. That Politico, always finding a silver lining in some dead people. I bet they're super-glad they're dead if it gave politicians the wake-up call they needed to realize that making sure people stay alive is the number-one job of fucking government.  

5) Does this throw a wrench into Obama’s vaunted ground game?

Maybe.

Well, that clears that up. I'm so pleased we have learned political authority figures to tell us what we need to know. 

You know whose "vaunted ground game" this storm throws a wrench into? (How does one exactly throw a wrench into a game? I mean, do you just fling it out on the basketball court or ...) The entirety of Atlantic City: 

It's like nothing exists except as holograms in the goddamn TV studio. What's really fucking depressing? The most grown-up person in this entire story is Mitt Fucking Romney: 

“Governor Romney’s concern is the safety and well-being of those in the path of this storm, not political considerations,” said Andrea Saul.

Silly Andrea. That's not how you WIN THE MORNING AND THE AFTERNOON. 

A. 

 

'I would have no qualms about seeing such sentences executed'

See, it's just a funny joke, killing journalists who don't write what you want to read: 

It is improbable that the framers of the Constitution anticipated a situation in which the press were entirely given over to seditious, anti-American policies. If they had, it is likely that their modus operandi would be similar to that for any faction found guilty of high crimes. Trials for treason and the requisite sentences would apply, and I would have no qualms about seeing such sentences executed, no matter how severe.

Except when it's not: 

CPJ research shows that this year alone, five journalists have been targeted and killed for their work in Pakistan--three of them in Baluchistan. More than a dozen journalists have been killed in the province since 2008. Local groups tend to put the numbers of journalists killed higher, but because of the political turmoil it is often impossible to discern the reason for an attack as many journalists straddle the line between political activism and reporting.

Just last month, Baloch, also a longtime local correspondent for ARY Television, was shot by unidentified assailants. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist, wrote after Haq's death that the journalist had been threatened by the state-sponsored Baloch Musalah Diffa Army in November 2011 and had subsequently been named on a hit list issued by its spokesman.

I've watched with disgust as journalists laugh off verbal attacks on their trade from wingnut critics who can't handle facts, as if violent rhetoric never leads to violent acts. I've watched as news bosses cozied up to people who denigrated their employees and devalued their work. And every time some angry right-wing crowd turns on a reporter, or a crew member, or an editor, I wonder when it will finally get to be too much, the "lamestream media" and the "rope, tree, journalist" and the dark muttering about treason. 

I know I talk a lot about what we do wrong, in the news business. I talk a lot about all the awful things that are done (and not done) but never for one minute do I think good journalism is unimportant or passé or no longer necessary. Why rage against the dying of the light if you hate the sun? Why bother criticizing something unless you want to make it better? I despair at the failures of our national press corps in no small part because i know how critical its function was once and could be again. 

And I know about other places, where "jokes" about executing reporters aren't funny, they're THURSDAY, and the men and women who get up every day and go out and try to tell the world what the hell is going on around them despite the very real possibility they might end up dead for it deserve better. 

A. 

Ring My Bell: The Press and Donald Trump

Reporters show up to cover something they know is likely to be bullshit, only to complain that it is in fact bullshit: 

Donald Trump today pledged $5 million to a charity of President Obama's choice, provided the president makes public his college applications and transcripts and releases his passport history, a far cry from the October-surprise bombshell Trump had promised.

If only there had been some indication that Donald Trump might be utterly full of shit  prior to this very sad moment. It all could have been avoided. 

Calling the offer a "major announcement," Trump released a video via Twitter at noon to much ballyhoo, and his online followers grew by the hundreds in the moments before the video was released.

Why yes. It's almost as if he benefitted from high-profile media coverage of some kind. 

Trump had been teeing up this announcement for days, and many hoped for a game-changing October surprise.

They had? Who are these people? Quote them, name them, at least tell us many of WHAT had been hoping for an October surprise. Many Republicans? Many voters? Many hairdressers? Many clowns? 

How exactly was Trump "teeing up this announcement?" By sending gullible, lazy and stupid national pundits and reporters endless press releases and Twittering things? Is that how he forced them all to attend his press conference? I was sort of hoping it was something more extreme, like maybe he held a gun to their heads, given that this story is written as if under duress. 

Oh, and no piece of total bullshit would be complete without false equivalency: 

Separately, liberals were also hoping for a late-breaking smear on Mitt Romney that would alter a neck-and-neck race for the White House, but that also fell flat today.

A Massachusetts judge will hold another hearing Thursday before deciding whether to unseal testimony Romney gave in a 1990s divorce case. Some people have accused Romney of lying under oath so a friend and political backer, Staples founder Tom Stemberg, would not have to pay a settlement his wife.

That didn't "fall flat." It hasn't happened yet. We don't know what's in those records. We don't know it's a "smear." Might be nothing, but it's certainly not equivalent to Trump throwing open Al Capone's safe only to find a squeaky toy and a half-eaten Twinkie in there, not yet. 

You know, I don't fault Trump at all for his antics. He's doing exactly what he's good at, which is being a better-dressed Joey Buttafuoco. But it is blindingly clear by now that absolutely nothing he says is important in any way, and 90 percent of it is false. So why is he being covered as though he has anything that matters in his head?

The stories themselves say flat-out that this was crap, which makes me wonder why there were stories at all. Instead of covering something only to bemoan how demeaning it is to cover it, why not ... not cover it? Call your assignment editor and say sorry, nothing new here, the thing died on the table? I had to do that all the time, and it sucked, but we have a limited amount of time on this planet and not everything was worth the ten minutes it would take one of our readers to get through the story.

Politicians and others are always calling press conferences to talk about things that don't get covered. It's perfectly possible (and at times even honorable) to refuse to listen when somebody wants to lie to you, to refuse to broadcast those lies, and above all to make clear that it is your goddamn job to make those decisions.

Once upon a time journalists took pride in not getting played so easily. Now they describe the precise ways in which they got worked and expect us to be outraged on their behalf. It's exhausting. Just shut up and go home and the next time Trump drunk-dials you promising he has Jimmy Hoffa in his car trunk, use the caller ID God gave you and don't pick up. 

A.