The only Twitter feed, or whatever you call them, that I like, other than Shaq’s, is Jay Rosen’s. I liked his PressThink blog too, but the posts were too long for me.
I’ve never seen him this mad before — link, link, link, link.
by DougJ| 23 Comments
This post is in: Media
The only Twitter feed, or whatever you call them, that I like, other than Shaq’s, is Jay Rosen’s. I liked his PressThink blog too, but the posts were too long for me.
I’ve never seen him this mad before — link, link, link, link.
by DougJ| 120 Comments
From the hand job Rick Stengel just gave Glenn Beck:
If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic.
I long for the day when both Time and Newsweek go under. It won’t be long now.
This is even worse than the puff piece the Post did on Beck a few years back.
(h/t Atrios)
If you get your news from liberal sources, the earth is roundPost + Comments (120)
by DougJ| 114 Comments
This post is in: Media
This is telling: the David Bradley vanity project ranks the “50 most influential political commentators”. Of the first 13, there are 9 conservatives, two liberals, and two other (Tom Friedman and David Broder).
I don’t need to tell you that this is at a time when there is a Democratic president and Republican representation in Congress is at a 40 year low.
Update. I probably shouldn’t be shooting the messenger. For all I know, this list is accurate.
Update update. Michael Calderone points out that it’s about the same as another similar recent list.
The top spots stack up nicely with Mediaite’s power grid, with break things down a bit more over several lists.There, Krugman is number one among columnists with Limbaugh atop the radio host list.
by DougJ| 93 Comments
This post is in: Media, General Stupidity
From Swampland commenter Kevin Lyda on ObamaKanyeJackAssGate:
Also, I’d like to repeat an earlier question, why was Obama even asked about Kayne’s outburst? Does every black public figure have to apologize for the misbehavior of any black celebrity? Is this some heretofore unwritten job title?
Eventually folks might start to think that’s pretty racist. So either you folks will stop adding such job titles *or* you’ll add such job titles to non-black public figures. Suddenly Hillary Clinton will have to answer for Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton’s transgressions. Gordon Brown will have to apologize for Russell Brand and Hugh Grant. John Bohner will have to apologize for Nick Nolte and Sean Penn?
Maybe you guys can have a little tick off box in your notebooks for, “Do you support/condemn [newsmaker of your ethnic group] for doing [bad thing]?”
Of course it would just be easier if black public figures just began all speeches or interviews by condemning some other black people who did something dumb. That would save you the effort of asking…
by DougJ| 74 Comments
It always amuses me when our pundits accuse others of being self-absorbed. Bobo:
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.
Every moment of every round table on every Sunday morning show *is* one big self-celebration. I wish I could say that these celebrations were routinely interrupted by intelligent analysis, but that isn’t true.
At some level, our entire elite media functions as a strange satire: residents of Bethesda and Georgetown telling flyover country viewers about how real Americans think, millionaires telling middle-classers they need to sacrifice more, narcissists complaining about self-celebration….
Update. And, yes, how do you write this column without mentioning “Mission Accomplished”?
Update update. More generally, it’s ludicrous to claim that our civilization has been humble in anything like the recent past. Whether it’s Francis Fukuyama claiming that the west has ended history, George Wallace declaring white Americans “the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,”, or the fact that perhaps the most iconic image in the world is God giving a white guy a high five, the western world is one self-loving place and has been for quite some time.
by Tim F| 44 Comments
This post is in: Media, Movies, Republican Stupidity, War
Being quite naive, I believed that Red Dawn would teach conservatives why violently occupying a foreign country would be a stupid idea. Wikipedia.
Initially, the occupiers had tried terror tactics, executing groups of civilians following every Wolverine attack, to intimidate the local population and the Wolverines into halting their attacks. However, this tactic backfires, and civilians lend increasing support to the resistance movement.
This brings to mind the time worn question: if you simplify a message to comic book form, and if you cast a magic spell over the comic book that makes every war-hungry conservative memorize it line by line, can they still miss the point? Let’s consult the same Wikipedia article.
Ironically, the operation to capture former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was named after the movie (Operation Red Dawn), as well as its targets, which were dubbed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2. The Army captain who named the mission said that: “Operation Red Dawn was so fitting because it was a patriotic, pro-American movie.”
All signs point to yes.
A Brief Thought For Wolverines Remembrance DayPost + Comments (44)
by Tim F| 28 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Media, General Stupidity
[I]t’s weird how disconnected the media is from the reality of the unemployment situation. It’s not that there’s no coverage, of course, but overall there’s little sense of the economic reality for so many people. The double whammy of the recession and foreclosure crisis has caused immense pain.
I have miles of respect for Atrios, but I cannot agree with this statement at all. As always the Washington Post has kept its focus squarely on the hardest hit.
LONDON — In this land of inherited privilege and celebrity billionaires, it no longer pays as much to be rich.
Hobbled by soaring debt and ballooning public spending amid the global financial crisis, the British government is joining others around the globe in tapping the wealthy to cover massive shortfalls. As a result, the tax rate here for those making more than $250,000 a year is set to jump from 40 to 50 percent, leaving the likes of Charlie Mullins — the self-made king of London plumbing — fuming. He estimates that the new bill on his $2.5 million annual income, with exemptions, will jump by no less than $236,000.
Observers say it is part of a far broader campaign in the wake of the Great Recession — including curbs on bankers’ pay and a rigorous global hunt for tax cheats from Switzerland to Singapore — that is suddenly putting the world’s wealthy on notice.
Why the assignment editor at the Post goes back to this well day after day after day is a question that maybe DougJ can answer.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with some winning the rat race and others losing. The corrosive effect that I see here is that obsessively covering the winners’ concerns amplifies their relatively mundane problems and minimizes the issues facing truly desperate people. This is not a trivial point; weighing one concern or the other would lead a low-information press consumer to support policy positions that are almost opposite one another.
A two-digit percentage of Americans fall into the terrible position of being one rejected medical crisis away from homelessness. God knows how many more once-stable middle class families the recession has pushed right to that edge. Yet, mysteriously, my WaPo RSS feed seems to filter out their narratives.
Maybe the press thinks that Michael Moore already interviewed everyone who is barely hanging on. Maybe desperate people sell fewer papers. Who knows. All I know is that that stuff like this hardly makes an effective counterpoint to the hateful drivel on FOX. In the end it seems hard to blame some Americans for thinking that Obama has no agenda other than (1) making Republicans upset (what does Newt think about this?), and (2) modestly inconveniencing wealthy people.
***Update***
I see that Atrios had this post written well before I did.
Focusing On Those Who Have Lost The MostPost + Comments (28)