…you’ve lost…well…OK, I’m not sure just what you’ve lost. But whatever it is, the Democrats have apparently lost it.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Real Journalism
I didn’t watch the whole thing, but reportedly, Bret Baier showed the rest of his colleagues how to interview a president tonight. Or at least this president. All it takes is a real journalist who doesn’t get a tingle up his leg to be in the presence of The One. Even A. B. Stoddard said that he was on the defensive. And it was nice to see someone call him out on his ongoing Medicare legerdemain. You can reduce Medicare costs, or you can reduce the new entitlement costs, but you can’t do both with the same dollars. And Baier was kind enough not to ask him about the “3000% decrease in employers’ costs for health insurance.”
[Thursday morning update]
Roger Simon: Obama must be desperate.
It does seem to me that despite the brave front being put out by her Highness and Hoyer (and Reid) and the White House, that they still can’t wrangle the votes, even for the Slaughterhouse Rules. There’s an excellent chance that this atrocity can be defeated, and it’s no time to give up. But the waverers in the House have to hang together, and not let themselves get picked off separately.
The Health-Care Talking Points
…versus reality. A lot of those talking points are familiar, because the supporters attempt to deploy them here, in comments.
The New Republic
As a commenter there notes, in its early days, it was a cheerleader for Mussolini and other fascists. So nothing has changed.
How Ignorant Are Journalists?
This ignorant.
As is pointed out in comments, it’s probably partly a generational thing. The generation that fought that war is dying and almost gone. But it’s also a consequence of how awful the teaching of history is in the public school system and universities.
And these are the people who are supposed to be informing the rest of us? No wonder Obama was elected.
Destroying A Brand
If this rumor is true, ABC will have completed the destruction of a respected Sunday-morning news show that started with the late great David Brinkley:
If Amanpour does accept, the long-running Sunday show could he shaken up, according to the report.
Amanpour said she wants to make “This Week” more about foreign affairs and less focused on domestic American politics. If she takes the job, her desire is to do a number of shows each year outside the country. If she takes the post, sources say this would be a complete remaking on the show, a program much more focused on international affairs. What’s more, Amanpour is telling colleagues that she does not wish to move to Washington, D.C., that she’d prefer to remain in New York and travel for the job should she decide to take it.
Given that Amanpour’s career has focused more on international news than Beltway politics, it makes sense that there could be format changes that play upon her strengths.
Since Brinkley’s retirement, it’s been all downhill, starting with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, then Stephanopolous. They’ve been trying out a few others since the latter left, including Jake Tapper, who (in my opinion) would have reelevated it significantly. If Amanpour takes over, I know I’ll never watch it again.
Dispatch From Some Alternate Universe
John Judis has some advice for Barack Obama, including the following paragraph, which makes it difficult to take the rest seriously:
Reagan and the Republicans ran against Carter and the Democrats in the same way as Roosevelt ran against Hoover. Baker and Atwater had studied Roosevelt’s and the Democrats’ 1934 campaign. (They even swiped “stay the course” from FDR.) But Obama and his advisors have been reluctant to stigmatize George W. Bush and the Republicans–perhaps out of a spirit of bipartisanship.That’s a mistake, as Obama seems finally to have realized.
Emphasis mine. Is this man insane? Or is this some new meaning of the word “reluctant” with which I was previously unfamiliar? Perhaps he means they’ve been doing it 24/7/365 “reluctantly”?
Five Lies
1. Bold government action staved off a Depression, saving or creating 1.5 million jobs.
“Just remember,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said on November 1, 2009, “a year ago today, last year, you had markets around the world come to a stop. Economic activity just stopped, came to a standstill, like flipping a switch.”
Geithner implies that the American business climate improved substantially in the first year of the Obama administration. In fact, nearly every indicator, from employment to freight transport to rents to retail sales to real estate, has headed steadily south. In some cases, such as unemployment, the numbers have been far worse than the Obama economic team’s worst-case projections. In others, such as real estate, the weakness of the market is masked by expensive government support, including but not limited to the unkillable First-Time Homebuyer Credit, an assault on loan underwriting standards (see Lie No. 2) by the Federal Housing Authority and the government-run mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the completely opaque $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP).
The $787 billion in stimulus spending authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is now best known for its inflated and unsupportable job creation numbers. At press time, Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina D. Romer (who, confusingly, made her academic reputation proving that fiscal stimulus did not help the U.S. economy during the Great Depression and World War II) was giving the stimulus credit for 1.5 million American jobs in 2009. All efforts at checking her claims, however, have turned up very different numbers.
There’s a lot more.
More Media Misconception
Joel Achenbach comments on the “botched rollout” of the new space plans:
The Administration failed to control the narrative. We are a species that communicates with, and makes sense of the world through, stories (as someone wrote a while back). My piece the other day in The Post quoted Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) saying that folks in Florida think Obama killed the manned space program. Of course, Obama actually boosted funding for NASA, and a lot of money is going into technology development. But he nixed the idea of going back to the moon in the near term. Where will we go instead? Unclear. Undecided. The moon is still a possibility, but maybe we’ll go to an asteroid or the moons of Mars.
Obama didn’t “nix the idea of going back to the moon in the near term.” Mike Griffin did that, de facto, when he chose his disastrous Apollo on Geritol architecture. All that Obama (or rather, the people who came up with the new policy) did was to formalize the notion. It is in fact likely that we’ll get back to the moon sooner with the new plans than we had any hope to in the old one. If the media had actually paid attention to, or better yet, read the Augustine report, they would understand this. I will give him credit, though, for not succumbing to the mindless hysteria about Obama having “killed the manned space program.”
Et Tu, Mary Ann?
Dawn Wells thinks that a Gilligan’s Island remake has to have diversity.
She is roundly and justly mocked at Free Republic. With a bonus Biden/Obama photoshop.
She just lost my vote in the next “Mary Ann or Ginger?” poll.