Look, I might as well tell you now. He's a monkey.

Otoh this sort of stuff is bullshit:

Reticence of Mainstream Media Becomes a Story Itself

Did the MSM drop the ball on John Edwards?

Wingnuts are doing a dance of joy today. After years of flogging stories that amounted to nothing but paranoid right wing fantasy, they finally got something right. I think the Infinite Monkey Theorem best describes their track record on the truth.

The idea that the mainstream media fell down on the job because it didn't cover a story which broke in the supermarket tabloids is absurd. When you break it down this story really isn't relevant and certainly not worthy of the shitstorm that covered the networks yesterday and today.

We have to push back hard against media navel-gazing on this. They were correct to blow off the whiners of the right who've been complaining for weeks that this story was being ignored. The cartoon world that conservatives live in already permeates to too great of an extent into reality. We don't need the media taking them any more seriously than they already do.

Psychologically, I'm very confused, but personally I feel just wonderful.

The article below covered the Great Republican Youtube Tantrum yesterday in the House as they argued for offshore drilling and in the interests of big oil.

Notice which large corporation presented (i.e. underwrote the reporter's salary) the article.

Brilliance. That's all I can say. Sheer, unadulterated brilliance!

From the media uproar at General Clark's comments it's apparent that the media actually agree that getting shot down in a fighter jet does qualify one to be President.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that that the media assume great failure to be a leadership criteria. This is the same media that hoisted not one, but two Bush presidencies upon us. Nobody else demonstrates the theory of "failing upwards" to a greater degree than George W. Bush.

With this in mind here are some of the other things that qualify somebody to hold the highest office in the land--

Getting run over by a garbage truck while crossing the street.

Tripping and falling down a flight of stairs.

Marrying and then divorcing Madonna.

Getting beaten and mugged my a street gang dressed as baseball players.

Leading an attack on a Lakota settlement along the Little Bighorn river.

As I think about failure as leadership I'm able to narrow our choices down to three candidates. John McCain doesn't make this list but he is in the top 10.

Wile E. Coyote

Curly Howard

Captain Edward J. Smith

Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty?

As I was pondering what I might write about last evening one thing was certain: not Anna Nicole Smith. Yet, here I am.

We have a tradition in the department I run in which we post pictures of actors and celebrities that pass away on the counter near the door. I think it started out of my love of pop culture, particularly film and television and my sadness at the loss of any entertainer that's brought me joy over the years. The pictures have become sort of an office tradition with coworkers streaming in to talk about the deceased, and share their own favorite moments from that person's career.

Yesterday, I must have had five different people ask me if we were going to put Smith's picture up and I responded to each with the same quip: "We would, but we were afraid what a Google image search would bring up."

The truth was I simply didn't care.

The way I look at it there is no reason I even need or should know Smith's name. She has contributed absolutely nothing to national zeitgeist other than a few pages stuck together in the magazines of young men some years ago. Her death was the sort of slow-motion suicide that was inevitable and shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.

But a funny thing happened this morning after watching the news and reading the paper. My apathy turned to anger and disgust. The country has more important business than Anna Nicole Smith. Our media are an embarrassment.

Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it.

Sigh. I don't really expect this to get better.

Pelosi may have another problem. As the crop of freshly elected Democrats — including many younger ones who campaigned to the right of the party line — came to Capitol Hill for orientation Monday, they encountered a leadership dominated by mostly liberal, old-school Democrats.

A couple of questions for the LA Times reporter: what exactly is the Democratic "party line" and what is your evidence that newly elected young Democrats "campaigned to the right" of it?

So much of what seems to be accepted as benchmarks to political discussion these days seems wholly seperated from reality. This model of the political breakdown of the two major parties is thirty years old. Old and busted: Democrats are hippy, liberal whackos. New hotness: Democrats represent the mainstream of American values.

Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here.

Along the same lines of the discussion about the national media and Washington insiders being clueless about what's going on in Connecticut and what it means to national politics there's this Boston Herald opinion piece that I came across via kos.

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Dick Bennett has been polling New Hampshire voters for 30 years. And he’s never seen anything like it.

“Lying b**** . . . shrew . . . Machiavellian . . . evil, power-mad witch . . . the ultimate self-serving politician.”

No prizes for guessing which presidential front-runner drew these remarks in focus groups.

But these weren’t Republicans talking about Hillary Clinton. They weren’t even independents.

These were ordinary, grass-roots Democrats. People who identified themselves as “likely” voters in the pivotal state’s Democratic primary. And, behind closed doors, this is what nearly half of them are saying.

“I was amazed,” says Bennett. “I thought there might be some negatives, but I didn’t know it would be as strong as this. It’s stunning, the similarities between the Republicans and the Democrats, the comments they have about her.”

These are parts of the same puzzle and it's not a difficult one. Democrats are fed up with the leadership of the party cowtailing to Republicans and triangulating themselves into the blandest positions possible.

Hillary may not have her "kiss" with Bush that makes for easy campaign fixin's but she'll still wear the President like an albatross once the primaries start.

Woodward. Bernstein. You're both on the story. Now don't fuck it up.

It's one thing for the administration to toss random threats at the Fourth Estate regarding the publishing of leaks but it's quite another to actually act on those threats.

A federal grand jury in Alexandria is investigating unauthorized leaks of classified information and has issued a subpoena to a fired National Security Agency officer who has acknowledged talking with journalists about the agency's warrantless surveillance program, according to documents released yesterday.

The 23-member grand jury is "conducting an investigation of possible violations of federal criminal laws involving unauthorized disclosure of classified information" under the Espionage Act and other statutes, according to a document accompanying the subpoena.

I haven't read Glenn Greenwald's page today but dollars to donuts he tears into this Justice Department stupidity.

Viva la First Amendment!

So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

Chris Bowers has become the go to guy for post-election analysis. I'm personally most interested in Busby's loss since that's the race most of the progressive blogshpere put their efforts into-

In 2004, Busby lost the CA-50 by 22.0%. Today, it looks like she will lose by around 4.5%. And that was with the NRCC spending $4.5M on the race. If Republicans want to spin losing 18 points after spending $4.5M of committee money as a good thing, go for it. After all, spin is basically why they spent so much money on this race. By blowing their wad in a solidly Republican district, they wanted to change the media narrative on the election in their favor. It will probably work, given how subservient and generally inaccurate the media tends to be when it comes to Republicans and elections. In reality, for a Republican candidate to pull 49.5% of the vote in a district with 44.5% Republican registration is shocking. Given those numbers, Bilbray probably managed all of 20% of the vote among independents.

No matter what the media says, no Democrat should be mistaken about this result. First, this is a huge, seismic shift in our favor that bodes extremely well for November. If we receive an 18% shift nationwide, we will win the House easily. If Republican candidates are pulling only 20% of the independent vote, the Indycrat realignment is still on.

Despite the happy talk and despite the fact that this race was considered a long shot I can't help but feel a strong sense of disturbance in the force. This does not bode well for Democrats.

Look, the media narrative is everything. If they say that the Republicans retention of this seat means the Democrats really aren't on the edge of a tidal change but it's business as usual then that's how the story will play out from here November despite the reality of polls, motivated voters in the Democratic base, etc. Howard Dean and the DNC should have recognized this and met the Republican spending in kind. It was a huge strategic misstep, IMHO, that they didn't.

On the last election night I invited a progressive friend who was only marginally involved in politics to the Democratic party election night gathering at the convention center so that we could celebrate the defeat of the President we hold in such disdain among people who shared our belief that America could do better.

I can still vividly recall the wild cheering that drowned out Senator Wyden's victory speech because the silent giant screens behind him showed some political pundit or other hypothetically flipping states for Kerry to show what a long shot it would be for him to win. Most of the crowd seemed to believe these results were real, rather than the efforts of some blow-dried airhead going out of his way to demonstrate how he firmly grasped the math of the electoral college that the rest of the country had mastered by the time they were twelve. The realization that he was simply playing with the toys on his cool election night set and that Kerry HAD lost was one of the saddest moments I've ever had to sit through.

Point is when I look at the political situation right now and consider whether I want to be at an election night party come November I just can't see myself there. I just don't have the strength to sit with a group of a thousand other realists and watch a small minority of Americans that also happens to be a majority of voters take America down the path to candyland one more time. I love this country to much to watch them smother her slowly to death with a pillow.

...you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.

There are a lot of things I'm grateful to my father for teaching me as a child but perhaps the the greatest thing he instilled in me was an understanding that I can be wrong.

Dad valued objective logic above everything and I think he understood that the greatest obstacle to the application of objective logic was the difficulty of overcoming one's own prejudices towards a preconceived notion of what is "true." He saw deductive logic as a road with many junctions and turnoffs in which the destination (truth) had to remain unknown by definition.

He had a big problem with Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Rand's exultation to "always check one's premise" drove him crazy. Rand was basically saying that if the application of logic doesn't bring you to the correct "truth" then you need to back up and find a path that will get you there. This inductive logic is nothing more than intellectual self-justification writ large.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately when pondering the state of politics in America. We spend a lot of time talking about the differences between red and blue America, the differences between conservatives and liberals, moonbats and wingnuts but the REAL difference that most dramatically separates Americans is the difference between those that celebrate and utilize objective reasoning and those that utilize subjective reasoning in the application of their personal politics.

Digby has an excellent post up on the media entitled Media Contortionism in which he takes the media to task once again for the false equivalency and balance which the regular media is killing itself.

The country is in the middle of several "wars" in both the literal and metaphorical sense. If it was ever called for, the time to "exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public" is long past. The public isn't crying out for "balance," particularly when those who claim to provide it have no earthly idea even how to define it. They are looking for truth. Plain, simple truth.

Perhaps it's just an error of clarification but I simply can't agree that "the public" is crying out for truth. A good portion of the public aren't looking to have their beliefs challenged but, rather, to have their beliefs reinforced or, as Ayn Rand might say: "to help them to remember their premise." They want to have THEIR truth justified, not THE truth.

Digby hopes that if we can get the media to recognize that by ceasing to play to the personal truths of a segment of the population those individuals will either come to painfully accept objective reality or to be marginalized and eventually lose political power. When considering some of the highlights of the political fights of the last few years, from the 2000 election fiasco to the Swiftboaters for Truth nonsense, I don't see those vested in outcome of those events walking away quietly and allowing themselves to be marginalized.

A loss of political power just doesn't fit into their premise. And don't even begin to try and tell them the parrot is bleedin' demised.