John and I were just discussing Chuck Todd’s unbelievably idiotic tweet defending McCain’s latest primary-induced flip-flop. Todd’s an idiot, but not as dumb as Howie Kurtz—was John’s take on it. Mine is that neither Todd nor Kurtz is dumb in the usual sense. To stay in the good graces of elite media is simple—just keep saying everything is good news for conservatives, that we are a center-right nation, that John McCain is a principled maverick and so on. Criticize the Iraq war and you get shit-canned—ask Ashleigh Banfield or Phil Donahue. Any reporter interested in having a cushy, high-paying gig for the rest of his or her life would be foolish not to keep repeating the Village-approved talking points.

It really is that simple.

I realize that, per Forrest Gump, one could argue that stupid is as stupid does. And obviously, saying things that aren’t true, making incorrect predictions, etc. is in some sense stupid. So I see that point.

Here’s how I look at it: once a barnacle finds a good rock to attach itself to, the barnacle eats its brain, because it doesn’t need the brain anymore. The barnacle would be stupid not to eat its own brain. The same applies to Chuck Todd, Ben Smith, Mike Allen, Howie Kurtz, etc.

Ausgezeichnet:

In January, Mike Rowland was so broke that he had to raid his retirement savings to move here from Boston.

A week ago, he and a couple of buddies bought a two-unit apartment building for nearly a million dollars. They had only a little cash to bring to the table but, with the federal government insuring the transaction, a large down payment was not necessary.

“It was kind of crazy we could get this big a loan,” said Mr. Rowland, 27. “If a government official came out here, I would slap him a high-five.”

In its efforts to prop up a shattered housing market, the government is greatly extending its traditional support of real estate, including guaranteeing the mortgages of middle-class and even upper-class buyers against default.

Personally, I would just slap the person responsible for this.

Even the liberal Mark Shields misses George W. Bush.

SHIELDS: We have a president of real intellectual horse power who is cool, detached and analytical and if anything you can watch the emotional side of him emerge in this whole process. … There’s an emotional aspect, the comforter in chief as well as the commander in chief. Both roles. And I think it makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection.

(via)

Update. I watched it again and I’m pretty sure he’s being sarcastic. If I’d known he was from Weymouth, I would have guessed this right off.

I don’t know why Erick Erickson hasn’t already announced a fund-raising drive to bring this… unusual… artwork celebrating President Obama’s visit to China back to a venue where it can really be appreciated…

(via WGNtv.com Chicago)

Perhaps the Red State Strike Farce simply can’t decide who’ll get custody. Or possibly $15k is some $14,913 $14,999,913 more than Red Erick’s Army can scrape together?

(I really liked the YouTube video “Obama Marketing Hits China“, but Reuters has chosen to disable video embedding.)

It never, ever ends.

If this country avoids becoming a Franco-style dictatorship in our lifetime, praise be to FSM.

What the fuck is she talking about?

In addition to the suggestion that government officials would consider hastening the death of the infirm or handicapped, she began her remarks with a puzzling commentary on the design of newly minted dollar coins.

Noting that there had been a lot of “change” of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase “In God We Trust” had been moved to the edge of the new coins.

“Who calls a shot like that?” she demanded. “Who makes a decision like that?”

She added: “It’s a disturbing trend.”

Update. I see the next two paragraphs answered my question

Unsaid but implied was that the new Democratic White House was behind such a move to secularize the nation’s currency.

But the new coins – concerns over which apparently stemmed from an email chain letter widely circulated among conservatives – were commissioned by the Republican-led Congress in 2005 and approved by President Bush.

It’s fun to hate on Politico, but Jon Martin’s understated arch tone here is perfect.

Al Gore said he invented the internet, the Clinton people trashed the White House before the Dubya moved in, etc. (Krugman via Atrios):

There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc.

But in Dick Armey’s world, in fact on the right as a whole, the affirmative-action-made-them-do-it doctrine isn’t even seen as a hypothesis. It’s just a fact, something everyone knows.

It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history. I hope the final copy has better fact checking.

The fact that this is a major media story says a lot:

The Washington Times has announced major changes at the paper this morning, with three top executives gone in the process.

[....]

There’s also been speculation that changes at the Times could be associated with last month’s handover of power in the Unification Church, the paper’s owner. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who turns 90 in January, handed over power to his three sons.

Yes, the Moonie Times has lower circulation numbers than the Syracuse Post-Standard, but you wouldn’t know that to see how often its “reporters” turn up on the liberal cable news networks.

The second most annoying thing about Andrew Sullivan’s latest back-patting exercise is how casually he repaints his part in the right’s psychotic 2003 wargasm as if he was just sensibly skeptical of leftwing extremists. Look, Sullivan has already admitted that he went way too far with the Saddam-lover, weak on terror Christopher Hitchens crap. Everyone but Dan Riehl knows that Sullivan bought wholeheartedly into something truly dangerous during those years. The war propaganda campaign did worse than wreck America’s economy and kill more Americans than 9/11. If Republicans did their job just a bit better, maybe not flushed their brand with Katrina and Shiavo and the Social Security embarrassment, America would be a different place.

Do we have accountability for torture yet? Did Obama rescind any Presidential powers? The last time I checked Glennzilla the government was still making inane appeals to the State Secrets clause. As much as it seems like we stepped a long way from the Bush years, too many reforms barely scratch the first layer of TV makeup. Let’s say the next guy decides that America does torture. What will stop him? A guilty conscience? We are too close to the edge to forget the sickness of Bush’s first term.

That said, I can get why Sullivan does not want to pick the wound daily, even if it leaves useful context unspoken. It galls me a lot more that he implies that ANSWER and Code Pink somehow equal Republican party leaders from Boehner and McConnell all the way down to Assistant Deputy Director of OMFGHITLER. I mean, jesus, I can’t believe that I forgot all the times that Harry Reid got on his knees to beg Code Pink to forgive him over some innocuous remark. The two phenomena are obviously exactly the fucking same.

As goes the special election in Michigan’s 19th State Senatorial district, so goes the nation.

I remember talking to voters in this district back in 1980, with Jack Germonde and R. W. Apple, at an old diner that only served coffee, donuts, and burgers. You could tell something was in the air. You could tell the Reagan revolution was coming. People were angry. Regular people, gritty people, blue-collar workers with plastic crucifixes on their dashboards.

I wonder what it would look like if liberal groups ever advertised online.

When you get right down to it, this (via NoMoreMisterNiceGuy) is ultimately more benign than uniting Christians for the coming holy war with Islam, though the apostrophe here makes the holiday look a little more Islamic:

The Vatican issued the warning through its official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, in an article headlined “Hallowe’en’s Dangerous Messages”.

The paper quoted a liturgical expert, Joan Maria Canals, who said: “Hallowe’en has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.”

Parents should “be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death,” said Father Canals, a member of a Spanish commission on church rites.

If Pete Sessions escapes with anything less than being publicly stoned with fake dog poop, he should consider himself lucky:

Make no mistake about it, Pete Sessions and the NRCC must shoulder most of the blame and responsibility, with Michael Steele and the RNC coming right behind them. They did not listen. They would not listen. They posited themselves as the smartest people in the room.

And we’ve cleaned their clocks.

Now? We should be magnanimous in victory — and whether Hoffman wins or loses, as long as Dede Scozzafava loses it is a victory — but we should demand accountability, we should demand a reckoning, and we should demand a purge from the party establishment of those people most responsible for the Republican disaster in NY-23.

As much as I love the professional climatologists who write RealClimate, they rarely let the anti-science crowd bait them into the kind of high dudgeon that makes PZ Myers or Tom Levenson so much fun to read.

Part of the reason for their patient tone is that most denialists are either too limited (e.g., Inhofe) or too mercenary (TechCentralStation, George Will) to absorb any correction. Since the debate opponent won’t even acknowledge that you exist most of the time, real climate scientists usually write for interested third parties. That is what makes the response from RC to the pseudo-denialist authors of Superfreakonomics (in truth, contrarians of the vanity kind that DougJ writes about), professionals with credibility to defend, so worthwhile to read.

I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

No more excerpts. The whole post is great so go read it.

This sounds like good news, even if it means that Democrats once again lost control of some important confidential data.

House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer.

In my opinion everyone on Capitol Hill is far too secure in their jobs. In the Army both scrutiny and punishment for a given offense partially depend on the defendant’s rank. The higher you are, the larger the book they throw at you (at least the system is meant to work that way). I would not suggest that we write a new set of penal codes for Congressional officials, but as it stands the system is structured almost the exact opposite of that populist ideal. These guys have the power, and their misbehavior impacts the nation harder than most quotidian crimes ever will, yet anything short of a Randy “Duke” Cunningham fire sale gets shrugged off as business as usual.

If it has to start with Charlie Rangel and Jack Murtha, fine. Off with their heads. Whatever it takes to put a little fear of the law in Congress’s untouchables is fine with me.