Stories to Watch: 9/15/11
For a piece for The New Republic, journalist Walter Shapiro sat down and watched “50 hours” of “a full sampling of the Fox News lineup.” He reports back a lot of inanity. “Looking back, it seems like a nine-day hallucination of strident voices, blonde hair, and more pitchmen hawking gold coins than at any time since the heyday of King Midas,” Shapiro writes. A courageous act of journalism, indeed.
How do you pull in a lot of readers? Do what James Carville did and suggest that the time has come for the White House to FREAK THE FUCK OUT!!. If you can get past the histrionic headline and his call for the Obama administration to “fire a lot of people,” the rest of it is pretty solid. Your mileage may very. He may have gone fullblown talking head, but the guy Clinton hired is still in there someplace.
President Obama will not include Social Security reform in his recommendations to the deficit reduction “super-committee.”
BREAKING: Rightwing bloggers are completely insane. They’ve resorted to lipreading to convince themselves that Michele Obama said something awful at the 9/11 commemoration. Haven’t got something to freak out over at a particular moment? Then just make shit up.
House Republicans finally discover a welfare program they like.
Anti-Muslim bigotry at the FBI.
John Boehner is a hypocritical clown.
Finally, Ron Paul’s grasp of geopolitical realities isn’t extremely tight.
Stories to Watch: 7/29/11
One good thing about a heat wave; the grass doesn’t grow. But now it’s over and it’s back to the absurdity of harvesting a crop once a week and throwing it away. Somebody please come up with something better. This is stupid. Now here’s the news…
Sen. Chuck Schumer says, “It’s hard to imagine the Senate Republicans would actually filibuster the nation into default.” I hope I’m not writing later about Schumer’s lack of imagination.
David Kurtz offers a much more detailed and much less optimistic assessment of the debt ceiling situation; “[E]ven though my gut says there’s no way the U.S. is stupid enough to default, I still can’t see a clear, viable way out of this.”
Dana Millbank sees Boehner’s failure to push through his bill last night as a vote of no confidence for the Speaker.
Let me give you an idea of how insane the debt debate in Washington has become; Reuters reports that growth is “anemic” and that the debt standoff risks recession. So, of course, everyone agrees that this is the perfect time to reduce demand and increase unemployment by drastically cutting spending. DC is officially an irresponsible bubble of crazy completely insulated from reality. “I realize it’s fallen out of fashion to talk about things such as economic growth and job creation, and it’s apparently far too late for a conversational detour,” writes Steve Benen, “but it’s worth appreciating the jaw-dropping disconnect between what’s needed and what’s being discussed by policymakers.”
Jon Stewart has been on fire lately.
Krugman once again takes on the brainless, kneejerk, lazy evil of centrism. Irony alert: he does so while filling in for David Brooks.
Finally, The New Republic points out that the GOP no longer has a coherent foreign policy — in fact, it looks like they don’t have a foreign policy at all. Noeconservatism has failed and now they have no idea what to believe.
