Mark Halperin seems genuinely upset that Chris Matthews isn’t swooning over Paul Ryan.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Brooks sounds so mad he may be edging towards that murder-suicide I’ve always fantasized about.
These fuckers really love Paul Ryan. They love the idea of ending Medicare. They don’t care if the numbers don’t add up.
These are sick, fucked up people. It’s amazing we’ve survived this long with people like this governing our discourse.
Chris
See, this is why Paul Ryan’s handlers insist on giving reporters drinks laced with Ecstasy before they interview him.
Actually, I’m kidding. Most people who have covered Ryan have obviously sucked up to him that shamelessly even without being on a drug that makes you want to become intimate with whomever you’re around.
(And actually, the other way you can tell these people aren’t on Ecstasy is that they want to screw the rest of the country, *not* Paul Ryan.)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
It was really creepy to read of Ryan and that grifter Glenn Beck exchanging “I love you”s on the radio. Ick. I mean that’s not normal for entertainers and pols; it was weird. and that was just reading it (I couldn’t listen, though media matters had a tape).
MikeJ
Foxbase Alpha is one of my favorite albums.
arguingwithsignposts
Brooks certainly is getting all het up about Ryan touching the “third rail” covered in copper (wtf?).
As I said the other day – worst slash-fic evah!
Valdivia
Typo, should say numbers do NOT add up.
I’ll try not to be angry that you posted so soon that my excellent comment in the previous thread will go ignored ;)
Do these people not realize they are buying Ryans Rand fantasy hook line and sinker while disbelieving real savings from CBO calculations in ACA? How can they disbelieve those future savings but buy these idiotic fantasy?
Next time the words alternative plan are uttered just yell back ACA.
That is all.
El Cid
I want someone to ask these gasbags if Ryan’s Medicare slash & burn were to be implemented if people supposed to get those $15K / yr cash / credits / vouchers etc would ever actually get them, particularly a few years down the road when another budget crisis causes many horrified politicians to denounce all these lazy Americans on the dole for their health care.
Kristine
@MikeJ: St Etienne forever!
arguingwithsignposts
@El Cid:
This is a good question. I was wondering if we could just get a big fat check at the beginning of the year and use it on whatever we wanted to. I’d blow it going around the world a la Anthony Bourdain, maybe, and die with a smile on my face at the end. Better than sticking it in the pockets of a fat-cat insurance exec.
Mike M
The media coverage on this issue so far, just like all issues I suppose, is focused on whose team this proposal will help or hurt. You don’t see headlines like “New Republican Budget Proposal Requires Senior to Pay 50% or more of their Income Towards Healthcare” or “How Many Seniors will Be Able to Afford Insurance When Medicare Cuts Take Effect?” or even “Will Eliminating Medicare System Really Lead to Prosperty?”
One reason that Americans don’t know the details behind many important issues — besides the fact that reporters might not have bothered to learn them — is that the media doesn’t consider facts to be especially relevant to a discussion of the politics. You won’t hear about how Grandma is eating cat food and dying from a treatable disease until it is actually happening, and then the narrative will probably be that it is sad but just can’t be helped unless those tight-fisted charities come through.
Kristine
These people don’t need the safety net. They are so blindered that they cannot conceive of ever being in the position to need it, and they truly believe that anyone who does deserves to be in the position they’re in. It doesn’t touch them in any way. They live in a bell jar.
They are so clueless that the thought never occurs that they may have something to learn. I wish we could ignore them, I really do.
Bokonon
I read through Ryan’s “plan” earlier today – and the thing is a political assault on Obama and the Democrats. Pure and simple. You have to literally wade through the politics to get to the substance that is there. Lots of this seems designed for shallow media consumption (“ooh, look Ryan’s plan cuts taxes and boosts employment, while the President has broken his promises! See here … it is all in Column A vs. Column B!”)
You think the fact that this is a highly politicized document would alert our professoinal media that this tract is maybe a little bit dubious – and is in no way comparable to the budget that the President proposed. But NOOOOOOO. Instead, too many of these people seem to have turned off their sense of smell, and have jumped on the bandwagon and are gushing about its “seriousness” and “boldness”.
I am sorry. There is nothing serious or bold about boilerplate attacks. And serious people are able to characterize their ideas in something other than partisan cheap shots and political rhetoric. And the “idea” behind this particular plan is really exactly that – it is one big, gigantic, huge, political haymaker by the GOP, with which there can be no compromise or discussion, and no normal political process. That’s the “plan.”
Delia
I want to know what happened to all those elderly teapartiers wandering around screaming “Keep your hands off my Medicare.” Isn’t it time to dig out that footage and start replaying it for the goopers now that they’re babbling about taking it away?
Mnemosyne
@Valdivia:
Because the idiotic fantasy will get them millions of dollars in tax breaks. Why should they care if the idiotic fantasy causes the country to collapse? They’ll just move to Bermuda where they appreciate rich people.
danimal
It’s possible, just possible, that we’ll reach the day of my dreams. The day in which the GOP presents a wonky, serious proposal on a major national issue, one with shared sacrifice and compromise, one with realistic assumptions and genuine commitment to reform. I dream of the day in which the pundits and analysts I respect take a look at the GOP proposals and say, “this can work.” I dream that they use their capital to improve the nation, even for the poor and middle classes. I dream of this day.
My dream always ends the same way, with the Dems demagoguing the debate and creaming the GOP in the next election. Just once, I want to see the GOP assholes feel the frustration that I’ve felt for the past few decades.
These people aren’t serious and they don’t deserve our respect. F$%$ ’em with a rusty pitchfork. Their preening over Ryan’s budget is disgusting.
AkaDad
Making the poor and the middle class sacrifice while cutting taxes and giving subsidies to rich is clearly the path to prosperity.
It’s really just common-sense.
Comrade Mary
@Kristine: Uh-uh — Neil Young all the way, babe!
R. Porrofatto
This is just lovely coming from the affluent prick:
He’s disappointed that some people won’t suffer enough for his tax cuts. Fucking douchbag.
Comrade DougJ
@Comrade Mary:
Yeah, I was thinking Neil Young. Bieber knows I’m not hip enough for St. Etienne.
MikeJ
@Comrade Mary: Here’s the one the kids who were hip in the 90s like.
General Stuck
It has always been known the conservative world and it’s GOP gathering point have despised any entitlement, since FDR introduced SS and The New Deal. There is nothing new about that, but those of us who follow politics also know that the braintrust of the GOP since have quietly surrendered to the SS and Medicare becoming bedrocks of American society, and most of the pol posturing has been delegated to the demagague room for short term political red meat for the wingnuts. Dems have their points of demagagueing their issues as well.
I may be over reading this event as more than it is, the GOP Ryan budget bill, but it seems to me, that at this point in time, in our national political experience, that what has happened is fairly earth shattering. With all the pieces of our recent econ troubles, demographic changes, and even electing the first black president. And a sole branch of government cast as the resurrection of the conservative movement, issuing such a document that sweeps away 70 years of painstaking lawmaking, in one fell stroke of a pen.
That is what the GOP has released is an unvarnished declaration, near completely devoid of the usual chicanery and restraint, and bullshit. To move the ball forward thoughtfully for their own purposes. It is nothing short of a new proposal for a constitution of sorts, with the only selling point being shut up, it’s what we believe. And the emo apoplectic ravings of folks like Brooks and Sullivan, and many others, comes across as praise for a wingnut Moses come to lead his people across a parted Red Sea/
And of course the numbers don’t add up. They are irrelevant to people caught in the throes of a ginned up political/religious awakening of sorts. Like souls lost in a desert coming across a lemonade stand. It is kind of scary, if you think about it too long. Insanity can be contagious. Elections usually cures that, usually.
Zam
@Delia: They only want to make sure the Black guy keeps his hands off their medicare, since he’d probably just steal it.
jrg
If you destroy it, they will come.
FlipYrWhig
@R. Porrofatto:
I’m also a little disappointed that David Brooks is going to be spared from being brained with an Applebee’s sneeze-guard. But there’s still time.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck:
I seriously read that as “electrocutions” rather than “elections.” Can we try that, too?
Lev
I’m guessing that David Brooks spends a lot of time wondering why people hate Washington so much. In fact, I’ll bet it keeps him up some nights. Why do people hate Washington? So many excellent people and ideas, like Paul Ryan and his magical budget.
At the very least, we’ll have the pleasure of knowing he’ll never figure it out, just like the aliens in Dark City. He’ll die without understanding it.
So, David, here you go: it’s fucking this!
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
If you have the vouchers.
MikeJ
@General Stuck:
What did Ryan call it? He said, it’s not a budget, it’s our new god, our golden calf?
Something pretty close to that, I’m pretty sure.
Comrade Mary
@MikeJ: Yes, I know Saint Etienne, and I’ve liked things like this. And if I’d never heard the original, I’d have thought it was a sweet, cool little number. But it’s an emotional blank compared to Young.
This is my lawn. There are kids on it. They know what they have to do.
DonkeyKong
I remember Paul Krugman on This Week a year with all the village fuckheads clucking on about Desiree Rogers and how she pissed in their shoes or whatever.
The look on Krugman’s face was the same look on Al Pacino in the Godfather. The sitdown in the diner with Sollozzo and the dirty cop. Just waiting to shoot them all in the throat.
I get the same look whenever I catch these pets of the plutocrates on the tee-vee.
Ksmiami
I’m going to take a more optimistic view and say that once people digest this abomination ryan will be cut loose as a fall guy. His plan is epic fail for anyone who wants to be re-elected
Paul
These people (most pundits) base their arguments for cutting the social safety net on the idea that we have to cut the deficit and pay off the National Debt.
Neither of these suppositions have any basis in reality, so their arguments fall apart immediately.
We have run deficits continuously over at least the last 80 years and have never made a substantial payment on the National Debt. The bonds mature and the Treasury rolls them over ad infinitum.
The National debt will never be paid back and no-one’s taxes will have to be raised 30 years, 100 years or 1000 years from now to pay it back.
The Government creates our money out of thin air – that is true regardless of whether it is through private banks by increasing their reserves/borrowing the money back or through direct spending. Either one is “printing money” and there is no other way to increase the money in circulation that fuels growth.
The government does not have to tax to finance spending. Spending must occur first or their would be nothing to tax. Taxes serve only as a brake to keep the economy from growing beyond our capability to produce.
Neoliberal economics is based on a foundation of sand and has been unable to forecast or prevent any fiscal crises over the last 30 years anywhere in the world.
Ireland was their low-tax low-spending model of neo-liberal magic and was running budget surpluses when the crisis hit – now they have been pushed into a cruel austerity program that has destroyed their economy for the past two years and driven 13% of their workforce to emigrate.
Paying for the bad behavior of the financial sector on the backs of the working man and the poor.
This is happening all over Europe and they are trying to do the same thing here.
Sadly the argument between the two parties is about how much to cut rather than whether cuts are a good idea at all in this environment. Democrats are adopting Republican framing on nearly every issue of importance. What the hell do they stand for that differentiates them from Republicans? We suck less?
The Village narratives are truly toxic and damaging to the future prosperity of the working class and the poor.
Paul in Florida
EvolutionaryDesign
@Bokonon: Brilliant handle! I just started reading Cat’s Cradle for the first time recently. Can’t wait to get to the end!
danimal
@Paul: Paul, you’re argument makes sense, but you are giving these cretins way too much credit. I want to club Sullivan et al over the head because they pretend to be in favor of eliminating deficits and the national debt, but they supported the Bush tax theft in 2001.
It was only 10 years ago. We were running a surplus. If they believed in sane economics to prepare for future entitlement costs, they would have supported the “lockbox” that they ridiculed Al Gore over. They didn’t. They deserve no respect and no mercy.
Cacti
Of course media pundits love the Ryan proposal.
They’ll be getting a 30% tax cut.
Donald G
Over on LGF, several posters have referenced the Roman Senate scene of Mel Brooks’ “History of the World Part One”:
http://youtu.be/rYqF_BtIwAU
Mia
What do they think they’re going to do for insurance once they turn 65 and are retired with no employer-provided care? Really?
Maybe all TeaTards are rich enough to self-insure at a time in life when it will cost a freaking fortune. But I highly doubt it.
sukabi
David Brooks: Do you think, as I do, that reconfiguring the welfare state to make it sustainable is the central challenge of the next decade or so?
I agree that reconfiguring the “welfare state” to make it sustainable is THE challenge of this decade or so… trouble is, we are talking about different things… the real welfare programs we need to change are the corporate tax holes, dodges, havens and giveaways… reform the corporate welfare model this country is embracing and we’d be well on our way to sustained prosperity for all.
adding that also adjusting the tax code to fully reap the full benefits of the actual tax rates on the upper 1% (ie, getting rid of all their tax shelters, dodges, havens, loopholes) and returning tax rates to that under Clinton would also be enormously beneficial.
Cacti
I’m still waiting for the “bold and courageous” part of the Ryan Plan.
1. Give rich a massive tax cut
2. Hike taxes and slash benefits for the working class
3. ????
4. PROSPERITY!
Sounds like the same old fairy tale they’ve been peddling for the last 30 years.
Elizabelle
@Ksmiami:
Word.
Ryan’s plan won’t work, either, but it’s the politics that will kill it.
Villago Delenda Est
Ryan is a shitstain.
So are his cheerleaders in the Village.
All of them need to be Ceausescu’d.
Elizabelle
@Paul:
To the middle class, as well.
But the Villagers do not live in the same world as the rest of us.
Honestly, I think a lot of them are blinded by their own light.
Elia Isquire
I have a question for those of you older than me (21):
Has the divide between everyone else and the media always been this enormous? Have the most prominent journos always been such jesters at the royal court? Is this something new? I swear to Jeebus every time I read Sully or watch Halperin or even read something by someone less patently blinkered by the DC bubble, I feel like I’m listening to a bunch of Versailles courtesans that history’s, mercifully, long forgotten.
RalfW
They love Ryan because, well, they have big man-crushes on him. I personally don’t think he’s all that, but clearly lots of people do. If yer pretty, you can say shit right into the TeeVee and people will buy it. Suzanne Sommers sold a lot of thigh masters with her, um, well, not her thighs. Though they may have helped too.
Seriously, I think Brooks is like 20% gay and can’t come to terms with it (yeah, that’d be bi like a Kinsey 2 or something) so when pretty bois with nice hair sell “serious” plans, Brooks swoons.
Which is gross, really.
sukabi
@Elia Isquire: As far as I can tell (I’m 54) there has always been a flirtation between the Wash Press Corps and the very wealthy… BUT it has gotten to the point in the last 15 years that it’s gone from a flirtation to a full-on orgy in the street, with the old jesters getting down on their knees to swallow the latest wad that’s being put out by the wealthy R’s…
General Stuck
@Elia Isquire:
No, when there were just the big three networks in the beginning, early 50’s late 40’s, it was determined that the public owns the airwaves for broadcast teevee, and a bargain was struck between the networks and the government to lease those airwaves with the string attached that by providing high quality news, like what was envisioned by the founders in a free press, then the private networks could rent the airwaves, IF, they carved out the news from their normal profit model, in favor of informing the public with effort at unbiased high quality truth telling.
That worked pretty well, then along came cable news, when CNN was first, and the only cable news program, they mostly went along with the deal, even though they weren’t considered part of the public’s airwaves, being driven by the satellite.
Along comes Fox, and all the wingnuts glued to their channel and high ratings and high profit, and it has since completely turned to shit. EVen to a degree with the networks news. Then comes along the internet, and takes even more pieces of the profit pie of news consumers and carves it up up even more, putting all sort of existential profit pressures on both print and broadcast news. We are currently in a free for all environment, with the only standard of who has the highest ratings from one quarter to the next, all of them chasing Fox and not helping themselves to adopt their lucrative model. A model based on al la carte news, or giving their watchers the truth they want to hear, and not necessarily the whole truth, or any truth at all.
General Stuck
@General Stuck:
And I would add, that with the Reagan era of conservatism permeating society as a whole, there has been a pervasive move toward corporate profit being the golden chalice of the American experience, and fueled by cheap credit for all out consumerism. And that has dumbed done everything, imo, in favor of the almighty commercialism, and news is caught in that same vortex.
AxelFoley
@Delia:
It’s not so bad when that nice young white man says to get rid of Medicare. But that colored feller better not git any thoughts about it.
Dennis SGMM
@Elia Isquire:
My age is exactly three times yours. That has to qualify as older.
Broadcast media was gutted when Reagan appointed Mark Fowler (Who had served on his campaign staff) to the chairmanship of the FCC. Fowler began repealing portions of the Fairness Doctrine in 1985. From 1949 until 1985 the broadcast media was compelled to present both assenting and dissenting views on any issue. Once that requirement was lifted it was open season on reality.
sukabi
@General Stuck: the “quality” of the news casts for both substance and context was much higher… although there was an active effort to “shape” the news back then as well… since Reagan’s crew lifted the “Fairness Doctrine” it’s been a race to the bottom of the barrel… between the 24hr “news cycle”, and carte blanc for one-sided coverage that doesn’t have to have anything to do with reality, it’s a miracle we aren’t in worse shape…
Elizabelle
@Elia Isquire:
Great question, and I hope a front pager runs with it. (Also, you are way wiser than I was at 21!)
It was not like this in the 1960s and 70s, to my recollection.
Forget the guy’s name, but someone at ABC realized broadcast news could be a profit center, and that opened the door to today’s celebrity infotainment complex.
Here’s an article on Walter Cronkite and Don Hewitt and their approaches to TV journalism:
http://newsroom-magazine.com/2009/academic/history/don-hewitt-news-as-profit-center/
I think the advent of cable TV news has dumbed down the profession, that newspapers and magazines used to be written for people with more attention span. I think the owners of the ginormous media corporations exert way more control over what’s covered, or not, than their journalist/employees will admit.
A more recent article by Ted Koppel on news as profit center, FWIW, embedded within this link:
http://ffbsccn.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/news-as-profit-center-news-as-amusement-–-not-good-news-for-an-informed-citizenry-insight-from-ted-koppel-and-neil-postman/
Quiddity
Halperin is making sense when he said (in the clip above):
Elizabelle
Elia: I threw your question into the open thread.
No guarantee folks will stop discussing dog training and lore to discuss it …
RosiesDad
@Elia Isquire: I’m also 54 and I remember a time when journalists worked hard at being objective and getting the story right. Cable news has for the most part destroyed that. Now it’s all about reinforcing the “party line” where the party line is whatever they decide it to be on a particular day. (The last couple of days it has been that Paul Ryan is a Serious Guy who should be taken seriously for offering Serious Solutions to our Serious Unsustainable Budget problem…)
It seems to me that euphemisms/phraseology are a regular thing today much more than when I was your age. Code words like “Change” or “Wall Street vs. Main Street” that end up as part of everyone’s commentary. When I was in my early 20’s, I don’t remember this so much. The big news anchors didn’t parrot one another and they weren’t surrounded by a small army of ass clowns to have false debates on the topic du jour. Today you can’t start the day without Pat Buchanan arguing with Harold Ford (or some other non-Liberal paraded as a Lefty). In fact, this entire “fake debate” ritual (pioneered on Crossfire, I think) may have marked the beginning of the end of objective political journalism.
General Stuck
@sukabi:
yea, I have a comment in mod on the general disaster of the Reagan presidency on the news business coming from a mindset of anti reg and pro profit that the country seemingly embraced at the time.
RosiesDad
@Elizabelle:
I think you are thinking of Roone Arledge, father of Monday Night Football, 20/20 and Nightline.
General Stuck
I’m 54 also too. Been that age for four years now.
RosiesDad
@General Stuck: Shit, son, you need to make yourself a year older so you can get on the Medicare bandwagon before they take it away from those of us born in 1957 or later. (My oldest friend in the world is 3 months older than me–born in Nov 1956. I hope he gets current Medicare bennies even if they fuck me out of them.)
rikyrah
RAchel Maddow did a good job telling the truth about Ryan’s bullshyt budget.
Elizabelle
@RosiesDad:
That’s the one! No wonder he didn’t come up as Reuven …
Redshirt
@EvolutionaryDesign: My favorite book.
Elia Isquire
Thanks for these responses and links. When on this topic I can’t help but let my mind wander towards the movie “Network.” It’s kind of eerie watching that film today — very, very prophetic (unfortunately).
Groucho48
One thing I’ve been wondering but haven’t been able to find a definitive answer for. Doesn’t this plan mandate that seniors buy private insurance? Sure, they are getting vouchers, but, the vouchers won’t cover the entire cost, so, won’t seniors be forced by the government to spend their own money on private insurance plans? As near as I can tell, getting insurance will not be voluntary.
Valdivia
@Quiddity:
If assholes like Halperin would not pimp the republicans so much maybe we could actually win that tax fight sometime no? Actually the polls say we already won it he just won’t accept it.
Tom Q
@Elia Isquire: You may have figured this out for yourself, but when Network was released (I was a little older at the time than you are now), it was seen by even those who loved it as wild, over-the-top satire. (Walter Cronkite was notably dismissive, saying he enjoyed it as pure fantasy) Now, it seems if anything not cynical enough. Glenn Beck’s entire trajectory with Fox seems Howard Beale to a t.
GregB
Fuckin A. Halperin is one gigunda tool of beltway gibberish wisdom.
He must have a string in the middle of his back with a plastic ring on the end that when pulled replays the most trite, banal GOP friendly gobbeldy-gook on the planet.
How does that cretin sleep at night? These fuckers all want to start pushing the elderly out of helicopters for God’s sake.
Is Halperin in the Urban Dictionary as another word for pud?
Calouste
@GregB:
Cash makes a comfy pillow.
Mark S.
As horrible as Halperin was there, Cillizza wasn’t much better. Matthews actually made the right points, about how it’s a tad evil to end Medicare while giving a huge tax cut to the rich, but he’s too ADD to stay with it. So the conclusion was “Dumb Americans don’t know what they want.”
Aside from a couple nights after the earthquake in Japan, I’ve hardly watched any cable news for months. I’m going to stick with that.
mclaren
America gets the pundits it deserves.
The American people have fallen in in love with torture — can they now complain that their pundits have embraced the infliction of mindless pain for no reason other than sadism? Birds of a feather flock together.
Howlin Wolfe
@FlipYrWhig: Gotta find an Applebee’s sneeze guard first. I hear their as rare as hen’s teeth.