good lord, the cable news is SO WEIRD lately!! this is my news thread

i mean just look at the shit eating grin on his face. wait, maybe i should actually CREDIT dan the snyder with upping the prices in NFL, thus letting eli's agent demand that the football giants spend a huge chunk of $$$/cap space to keep him?

lou dobbs calls olbermann some stuff, says the real stories about KO's tenure at CNN are yet to come out, says he's on some mystery medications

this is all hilarious and great. one giant feedback loop of pointless blather and everyone gets paid! god bless america.

olbermann snapped back at dobbs tonight, said some shit about dobbs' wife that made me cringe a bit. get a room, fellas.

i can't stand keith olbermann. he went off yesterday about billo and fox news. o'reilly going off now about GE (owner of NBC now) for some fine they got & accusing them of corruption and promoting obama.

ok, so did rupert murdoch manage to completely punk GE/NBC/olbermann here? i mean, some "truce" is called june 1, olbermann goes along with it, truce gets leaked to the press, olbermann looks completely disingenuous & tries to cover his ass, so calls out o'reilly and murdoch again and the overexplains to the blogs, making the situation worse.

o'reilly goes right back to attacking GE/NBC for getting billions of taxpayer money & sucking up to obama.

sometimes i look at the new answers & realize why i hang out here and talk to myself

sotomayor confirmed. and after all those weeks of people freaking out over the 'wise Latina' comment, the shep is like, wasn't she just talking to an audience she was trying to inspire? you know when i go back to mississippi i talk to people about being from there & being successful and all. later on napolitano says, another liberal justice wrote an autobiography saying justices all bring themselves, eg who they are as a person, to the bench, that everyone has a point of view, and she was saying the same thing. talking about today as historic. <3

& shep flat out asked sen. martinez if he was pandering to hispanic constituents in florida by voting yes, since he's a conservative republican, then got him to say that he thought other republicans should've voted differently. these are totally fair questions, but he's been v tough on republicans & said something about lindsey graham's ability to smile while he's just tearing someone to shreds. asked judge bork if it wasn't the responsibility of the GOP to sufficiently ask questions to find out enough about the nominee's views.

this is really interesting to me because it seems the underlying point to all the sotomayor coverage on shep's shows - ok, i guess he just said so - is that we don't find out much of anything about the nominees in these hearings any more. and that even the dems/obama might end up being surprised by how she actually votes. which is so true, & frustrating watching nearly all the oxygen taken up by rightwingers (unjustly) calling her a racist, and the left saying ZOMG those racists called her a racist.

surprisingly, sanchez @ the cnn was on a completely different subject during and after the vote & didn't stick with this very long at all.

i flipped back to msnbc and shuster/hall were talking to some dem strategist about.. the gop portraying her as a racist.

and to be extra contrarian, i don't know how i feel about dems portraying all the town hall protesters as angry fringe types brought there by astroturfing pr/lobbying firms. it's true that some of the disruptive people were organized that way, and astroturfing is dishonest and corrupts the process, but on the other hand, there really *are* plenty of people who are uneasy about health care reform and other things the government is doing. it just looks like dismissing all dissenters out of hand, which IMHO is a bad strategy.

fareed zakaria asks hillary <3 <3 <3 about what john bolton said re: rewarding north korea. she just laughs.

cnn's 'first 200 days' special is tonight with another report card! not sure why they didn't go by jon stewart's assessment and kill it after the first time

bill o'reilly writes in parade magazine:
"What President Obama Can Teach America's Kids
"'Obama's "breathtaking achievement presents five important lessons for all children:' Forgiveness, Respect, Persistence, and the notion that in America anything is possible."

saved for later!

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drinking (fake?) wine with fake pelosi

i really don't know what the deal was here, i had to turn the sound off

"'Obama's "breathtaking achievement presents five important lessons for all children:' Forgiveness, Respect, Persistence, and the notion that in America anything is possible."

Is it just me, or is that only four lessons?

i think what happened is ben politico summarized it and left something out, i guess the thing hasn't been published yet.

i wonder if that is shep's stage manager there in the pelosi mask, whoever it was *could not stop laughing* the entire time

keith olbermann criticized by a bunch of people, putting some blame on his management team while he was out taking care of his dying mother

?? dude, it's YOUR show, you own it. some might say this is embarrassing.

w/o rly knowing what the beef is, i defer to glen gleenwald. if this is some murdoch/g.e. feud-by-proxy, gross!

uh, glenn greenwald

i don't have the impression there's a murdoch/GE feud, more a mutual awareness that these two sniping at each other wasn't good business? o'reilly's fans (and there are a heck of a lot more of them) might've been especially out of pocket what with barging into a GE shareholder meeting..

so maybe someone at news corp thought o'reilly was going way too far? i don't typically watch him, but saw o'reilly completely freak out about it once, talking to the shep (hype man for o'reilly's hillary <3 <3 <3 interview, so i did have to watch the factor that day). not sure if he was *trying* to push o'reilly's buttons by asking if he'd ever want to host a network newscast.. but instantly went from strained but polite conversation to o'reilly just going off about how he'd never work for nbc news, how horrible they were, how GE was dealing with terrorist regimes and they all had blood on their hands and were responsible for getting our soldiers killed. it was like boom, full-on angry finger pointing rant mode, totally unhinged. shep said something quietly to the effect that brian williams was a friend & he had a lot of friends at nbc & o'reilly ended up looking pretty awkward. so i figure, if he was on the factor night after night straight up telling people GE/NBC was getting american soldiers killed.. eventually that's gotta cause problems for GE.

<3 <3 <3 glenn greenwald. what's funny with keith and billo is, i guess if you even try to treat either of them like a serious journalist (even though obv neither one is), they pretty much lose their shit.

chris wallace just now: "when in doubt, always close with a piano playing cat."

i wonder just how pissy olbermann gets about this tonight. i guess he can be as embarrassing as he wants so long as he gets the ratings, but now that even (some) liberal bloggers/huffpo are questioning him..

so i guess that beck guy joked about poisoning pelosi's wine but the best thing about this: the person in pelosi mask seriously. cannot. stop. laughing.

poor toobin, he's better than this. there are TWO tables of pundits grading stuff!
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hey daria

this is like my favorite thread on ilx. keep posting at length even if no one else is. in a few weeks, when i go back to school, i'll jump back in the cable news game. for now i'm spending my days playing playstation and going out to lunch with my grandmother. i <3 u 4 this tho.

i think i'm not the first person to make this joke, but cnn really needs to get a hollywood squares like contraption going

you're right, btw, about the way liberal commenters are treating the psedu-astroturf protests. keith & maddow - both of whom i love - have been glossing over the larger point that these people have had their minds basically poisoned in order to fish around in this larger pool of corruption and fake grassroots and if you watch these videos it's just obv not true. tonight keith had a kind of disgusting segment with jonathon alter dissecting these rallies, and while the video was compelling, the way they responded to these people was really elitist in a way that's really on the wrong side of the line. and i rarely feel that way. alter seemed almost sheepish tbh.

thanks! i have to find some way to entertain myself. i am doing freelance data migration type stuff and it is SO boring (but pays good money) and it's like, i need basically one concentrated distraction, otherwise i get completely distracted by everything. it's like writing a term paper, there has to be music on or my brain won't stay tuned to one subject.

i saw some maddow earlier, she & guest were also on point, arguing that nobody really got too far into what sotomayor's actual views were & a lot remains unknown. i like maddow very much about 2/3 of the time, can't handle the 1/3 where she's.. doing cute 'conservatives are fools' segments to make her audience feel good about themselves.

surprisingly when cnn's media & pundits grade the media, they all think they suck and give themselves a gentleman's C except for GOP dude castellanos, who is like "A!" and then goes on about how newspapers might be in trouble, but there are all these great new sources of information and it's coming in from everywhere! the internet, the blogs!

i wouldn't have expected the conservative pundit to be the new media evangelist there.

ok napolitano has been off the chain today about this theory that the white house requested people email them health care misinformation because.. they want to intimidate people. (link is from this guy whose entire blog is devoted to stanning for fox news)

i wouldn't go that far! generally i tend to appreciate napolitano's constant skepticism/wariness about basically everything the government does, but i think he gets a little paranoid.

I heard about this on the radio on some second string right wing broadcast and the guy was saying that he wouldn't say that it was an Orwellian move by the administration, but then his producer and screen clearly were trying to put on people who would imply that it was, and the host couldn't help strongly implying that it was either. Thing is, I just kept saying, "This is boring. The move was completely inappropriate, a p.r. disaster, could too easily be misread and the administration shouldn't put themselves in a position of being seen as have the power to abuse people's privacy for having a certain political position. Who's arguing? Next crazy right wing agenda, please."

If the Bush administration did this dailykos or whomever would certainly harp on it.

As for Castellanos' A: you've read about those tests researchers did in which the subjects did little quizzes, gave their political affiliation and then rated their confidence in having right answers? And the self-identifying Republicans not only scored lower but also had higher confidence in the rightness of their answers?

I wish Maddow's and Olberman's shows tried less to be antidotes to the crap on Fox and CNN. I'm also tired of seeing so many of the same guest talking heads every day (Eugene Robinson, Anna Marie Cox). Why maintain the illusion that they're guests if they're on the payroll, if they're there everyday? Maddow went on and an about the C Street thing for two weeks despite the fact that the information only trickled in.

Basically agree about the astroturfing thing. Sure, there's a concerted lobbying effort behind this, but these people aren't showing up to the town hall meetings for the same reasons that the lobbyists, PR firms and the corporate interests paying them are - they really think this stuff and care about it. So the obviously find new ways to communicate with them, and make sure that constituents in favor of the Dems' health care reform keep the representatives mindful that they're voting too.

xpost - sorry! - maddow seems to be one of the few on tv who actually takes seriously the prospect of political violence incited by this rhetoric. had on rep. baird (d-wa) who cancelled his town hall meetings due to the possibility of extremists disrupting them.

i wonder what kind of emails they're getting. because if this is what we're hearing on the news, what we're not hearing might be truly scary.

i also wonder if progressives/democrats are making a big mistake by dismissing and mocking this tea party thing, in the sense that, people are out there organizing, and they're connecting, and they're showing up, and i don't know what they're going to do other than try to screw things up for obama, but isn't it better to actually try and understand what they're doing and why? i'm just saying, if significant & growing numbers of citizens are organizing... something, maybe you had better pay attention to why they're bothering to do it. what happens when they start throwing money/time at candidates and running for office themselves?

it was a bad PR move. napolitano made the point that the whitehouse has to keep messages that people send, that's just the law, but in this context, what are the implications.. and i guess the right is reading it as a call to snitch on your neighbors.

i wouldn't agree with castellanos A, was more struck by the fact that he was the only one who seemed excited about new media & the rest were all glum about the death of journalism. wouldn't have expected a republican to be the one who's all "hooray change! the future!!"

and i am so uninterested in the C street story.

i mean, the dems were light years ahead in netroots/online organizing during the last election, but it might not take as long for the other side to catch up as they think. the tea party thing + recess/town halls + dems saying some things that threw fuel on it.. i mean, the right got people angry, now they're giving them things to do..

Are you talking to me? I agree that communication and education are the key, but . . . where is there an honest debate about the merits of health care reform in the mainstream media? Charlie Rose? Who makes basic arguments like: "Although we will spend this money and tax you, because we can run health care more efficiently, prices will drop and competition in the marketplace will benefit us all, and the saved money can theoretically go back into GDP, thereby making us richer"? The public rhetoric will drive the votes, won't it? Or the rhetoric and the marketing of it for political purposes. And the major news media outlets simplify the arguments until they practically atomize them and will give bogus equal time to oppositional arguments no matter the fallacies or falsehoods.

I know what I'd like by way of news information and televised debate, &c., and it doesn't include ridiculing opposing ideologues. However, I'm not decided about the pragmatics of using news media platforms to effect political change or preserve political power. The democrats have been traditionally more reluctant to engage in the sort of speech and PR and mudslinging as the republicans (how true is this about the dems anyway, is it just mythologizing?), but they see the tactics of the right wing media and maybe they think, "I want some of that. I want to try that. If it works for them, it could work for me." Could it work for them? Or would reaching out across the aisle work better?

But yes, I agree, these people who are organizing should be addressed somehow with easily-digestible but credible messages. That's the hard part. The bullshit lines of the health care opposition are easy to parrot; except not all of these are bullshit lines, I guess - I saw one of the town hall clips with one representative saying such and such a thing wasn't her job (knowing the particulars of the senate bill, I think) and I was thinking, oh, I don't know, "How injudicious," or something.

I really want the public discourse, especially the televised discourse, elevated to the level that I, as someone who supports this legislation (or the gist of this legislation), can understand it philosophically, fiscally, operationally - everything. That isn't happening/won't happen.

What am I doing, am I in a political discussion? I hardly follow politics. To self: watching twenty minutes of MSNBC here and there is not following politics.

Death of journalism - this is some McLuhan shit. Journalists need to know their McLuhan in and out, I think!

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one of these people knows how to hold a glass of wine properly. the other one is just keepin it real

john harwood hosting some "NYT edition" hour on msnbc talking to matt bai: Funny How? The president, it turns out, is quite funny — and sometimes a little reckless.

apparently older people don't "get" obama's sense of humor

that new york times stuff on msnbc is pretty dang weird - it seems like such an obv reaction to rupert having the wall street journal as a forum

yeah it is weird! also i thought they had a particular connection to the washington post, since their people are on there all the time, right out of the wapo newsroom. i wish they'd give more airtime to some of the other journalists at those papers instead of mostly having on pundits/political writers.

LOLs @ fox news teaser for tonight's programming: watch BECK.. and later on, our special on CHARLES MANSON

TONIGHT: sean hannity LIVE at the FREEDOM CONCERT with special guests OLIVER NORTH and CARRIE PREJEAN
ROCKING OUT FOR FREEDOM

(realized i have to be somewhere & was like, damn..)

god he has SUCH a boner for carrie prejean. it's so awful.

he's always like EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH CARRIE PREJEAN - and really no one cares

ugh now i am imagining a hannity boner, thanks jordan

the great american boner

does he refer to it as "a great american"

xpost ha

well i don't care about carrie prejean, but what do i know, i hate freedom, america, puppies, kittens, and apple pie

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stealing ur bandwidth, dan abrams

correlation =/ causation, but this is funny
What's Bad for the GOP Is Good for Fox News

ok, guess i was on the right track. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080604105.html";>kurtz</a>:

(GE CEO) Immelt detailed his grievances. His elderly parents in Cincinnati, he said, watch O'Reilly every night. How did Ailes think his mother felt when O'Reilly put up Immelt's picture and blamed him for involvement in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq?

(GE had done business in Iran, a nation which U.S. officials said was arming Shiite militias in Iraq, but the corporation has since ended those contracts and now provides only health-care aid licensed by the federal government. "If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt," O'Reilly once told viewers.)

Ailes countered by asking Immelt how O'Reilly's wife must feel when Olbermann made references to the Fox host's personal life and a long-settled sexual harassment suit. Olbermann once imagined the fate of "a poor kid" born to a transgendered man who became pregnant, adding: "Kind of like life at home for Bill's kids."

nice job going after the transgender person, progressive hero keith. anyway, after Olbermann calls out O'Reilly for the Tiller murder:

The next night, O'Reilly retaliated. He said MSNBC was spewing "hate," declaring: "Immelt is using his news operation to promote the Obama administration and liberal activities, while seeking billion-dollar government contracts from the president." O'Reilly said his program was looking into whether GE was doing "deadly business" with Iran. He gave out Immelt's e-mail address.

sorry
Out and a Bout- Olbermann, O'Reilly Are Still Fighting

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dude on far right (hah) -> roger ailes

this is like pro wrestling if pro wrestling were just a bunch of angry guys cutting promos all day long and nobody actually fought, they just cut more promos.

rachael maddow going all-in tonight on this subject of.. the implications of people like limbaugh comparing dems to nazis, beck's rhetoric, some of these astroturf groups.. if using language evoking nazism is a specific call to violence. guest on saying the coded language to the crazies is saying "go for broke."

her guest Frank Schaeffer brought up all the massive sale of guns/ammunition since the election and straight-up asked what beck and fox news would say when someone takes a shot at the POTUS or a congressman or senator.

Hosts Refire the Insult Machines

The executives had sought for years to tamp down the attacks by Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, to little success. Frustrated by the refusal by NBC’s chief executive, Jeffrey Zucker, to halt the attacks on Mr. O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, personally instructed Mr. O’Reilly’s program to aim at Mr. Immelt, people familiar with the situation said.

hahaha roger ailes doesn't play