The new Washington Post editor used to be in charge at the Wall Street Journal. This would have been an honest choice twenty years ago, but today it seems odd, as if the WaPost had decided that further impeaching their brand was more important than regaining their readers’ trust.
Howie “the Whore” Kurtz has the details. [A Tiny Revolution has more.]
Also at the WaPost, a Republican plagiarist fights for his District Court nomination.
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A cool, computer-driven school in Boston.
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I love when newspapers embed an editorial in a picture and caption.
From the front page of today’s Chicago Tribune. I’m not sure, but I think this is their way of telling Amy Jacobson that they’ll run the hidden bathroom toilet-cam photos if they want to, lawyers be damned.
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I’ll admit that I’m not the most tactful person, but even I wouldn’t use an official U.S. government document to say this:
The biography describes Berlusconi as one of the “most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice.”
The synopsis, the work of the Encyclopedia of World Biography, reports that Berlusconi burst onto the political scene with no experience and used his “vast network of media holdings” to finance his campaign on a promise to “purge the notoriously lackadaisical Italian government of corruption.” It goes on to say that he and “his fellow Forza Italia Party leaders soon found themselves accused of the very corruption he had vowed to eradicate.”
In a written apology, White House spokesman Tony Fratto acknowledged that the biography had used insulting language. “The sentiments expressed in the biography do not represent the views of President Bush, the American government, or the American people,” said Fratto, whose family hails from Italy. “We apologize to Italy and to the prime minister for this very unfortunate mistake.”
Not that this isn’t common at Bush’s White House, but usually they remember who’s an ally and who isn’t. Berlusconi has stuck his neck out for Bush in the Middle East, and this is the thanks he gets.
Fortunately, it’s exactly the kind of thanks he deserves.
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Hasbro v Scrabulous, round three.
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I’m skipping most of the McCain bashing as it’s irrelevant to life as I know it. However much McCain may own our corporately whored out media, the media just isn’t a part of many voters’ lives anymore.
Still, it bears mentioning that McCain’s allegation that Obama’s tax hike would impact 21 million sole proprietor tax filings is ridiculous. Steve Benen does the math and only 2% of sole proprietorships earn the quarter-million dollars a year it would take to get a tax bump from Barack.
But that’s not what I find newsworthy. No, my angle on this is the failure of the news media to call McCain out on this whopper.
Corporate news media: my “cunts” for the day.
Yep, that’s a new blog feature. Feel free to use the comments to nominate your picks for the Cunt of the Day. The only qualifier is that to be a Cunt of the Day, you have to be a real prick. Dickheads only, please.
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Thomas Frank has a follow up to What’s the Matter with Kansas.
Republican misrule and mistaken policy is the intended fulfillment of conservative antigovernment ideology, argues this scintillating j’accuse. Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?) surveys what he regards as the hallmarks of conservative control of Washington: a government hobbled by budget deficits, disgraced by scandals, downsized, outsourced, hollowed out and sold off to corporate interests and thus made incapable of meeting its basic responsibilities. The result of this “political vandalism,” he contends, is a perverse propaganda triumph for conservatives, who point with gleeful cynicism to the shambles they make of government as proof that government can’t do anything right. Frank presents a scathing recap of Republican mismanagement and corruption, from the Hurricane Katrina debacle to the depredations of Jack Abramoff, and combines it with a shrewd dissection of the theories of conservative ideologues who call for and celebrate the sabotaging of the state. Writing with a barbed wit and finely controlled anger, he skewers such juicy targets as libertarian strategist Grover Norquist and Michelle Malkin, “a pundit with the appearance of a Bratz doll but the soul of Chucky.”
No, I probably won’t read this one either, but usually enough blogs excerpt chunks and pre-chew the content for me, making it easy to get most of the tasty good stuff without having to wade through entire chapters of information.
Here’s a taste from that penultimate link:
Let us start with conservatives’ sense of their own exclusion. [...] The government is never theirs, they believe , no matter how much of it they happen to control. [...] For most of the past three decades these insurgents have controlled at least one branch of the government; they were underwritten in their rule by the biggest of businesses; they were backed by a robust social movement with chapters across the radio dial. Still they remain the victims, the outsiders; they fight the power, the establishment, the snobs, the corrupt.
Mmmmm — yum!
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Whew. For a second I thought I heard a leaf blower starting up, but it was just some idiot on a scooter with an insufficient muffler.
The mini-mall across the street uses leaf blowers to clean up their parking lot and green spaces. Two, three guys with leaf blowers at a time. Why that’s legal, I cannot begin to imagine.
Noise pollution will be a huge future battleground, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how the morons on the right will manage to sell the right to make a godawful racket. For starters, all you’d have to do is send a couple of low riders with their subwoofers cranked to 11 to any anti-noise regulation rally and you’d drown out the speakers and then some.
Like junk mail, junk faxes and spam, just who in the fuck is lobbying to keep gas-powered leaf blowers legal?
Blogging is still in its infancy. What I’m waiting for is some J-school or government studies program to put up a website that annotates every bill passed by Congress, making it easy to see who lobbied for each bill, and how much money was given to each member of Congress voting in favor of a bill that benefits special interests.
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Sara Robinson on the new nuclear technology that intrigues so many politicians.
Sara is fair beyond reason. She summarizes the pluses so well, I thought the new technology was the latest in sliced bread.
Well, I kept reading, and shit — maybe it is! Waste is less of a problem, ditto weapons-grade byproducts. Less uranium is used, meaning existing reserves could last centuries.
But I’m sure some of you know better and will comment to that effect.
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I’m way behind on my Digby. For those of you who only read her when I have a link, here’s some catch up:
Video of Republicans repudiating Bush
In death, the rancid race-baiting Jesse Helms serves our cause
Truth does in Wes Clark [and more on that]
Digby on a commercial I saw while in Wisconsin
Nothing like reading a raft of Digby to convince me it’s time to end this meandering post and go back to considering a career in catalog copy writing.
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Frankly, in a Peak Oil scenario, reactors like the ones discussed in the article make a lot of sense. But we’ll all have to come to terms with the fact there’s no one stop solution anymore- it’s gonna have to be a mix of all sorts of ways of generating electrical power.
The next Administration will have a big say in how the next energy infrastructure will be built- and that is the real issue here. We can’t afford to let Republicans take any part of building it. We could have done it relatively painlessly going forward from the Carter Administration but we all know what happened after that.