Sad Money

I know my blog-rate is petering out here, but I had to comment on the heartbreaking mastery of Jon Stewart's Frost/Nixon job on "Mad Money's" Jim Cramer. I guess everyone who hasn't been living under a rock has seen the show, and those living under rocks have probably seen at least a clip, but if you haven't seen the full interview, it's HERE.
Not surprisingly, the parts that weren't aired were the more amicable moments. I know I shouldn't, but I hope Jim is OK. I'll just keep thinking of all those CNBC viewers who lost their life savings.

Newsflash: Chris Wallace Believes What He Reads In "The Media."

on Fox News today:

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Since you became president, you have warned Republicans, quote, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done."

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Now, how do you know that's a quote?

WALLACE: Well, I read it in the media.

OBAMA: Yeah.

WALLACE: Did you not say...

OBAMA: I just wanted -- I'm not sure that was the exact quote.

WALLACE: Let me throw another one at you and you tell me whether this is an exact quote. You were widely quoted, when you met with the House GOP caucus saying, "Go ahead, free feel to whack me. I'll watch Fox News and feel bad about myself."

OBAMA: That one I did say.

WALLACE: Is perhaps -- let me just raise the possibility -- are you a trifle thin-skinned?

OBAMA: No, no, no. I said it in good humor. I think everybody understood that that was a joke.

Yep, Chris, this guy is no Clinton in the hot seat, but no Bush, either. What did we learn today? Chris Wallace follows the MSM and has no sense of humor.
I like our president more and more every day.

Quote of the Year (so far): Joe the Plumber...

... I mean Middle East war correspondent:

"I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting."

More words of wisdom from Joe

Google-head: The Atlantic Asks...

... Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Umm, maybe... although I think, in reference to one of the author's points about ever-changing technologies, the emergence of the computer keyboard with easy delete key is probably an improvement over the typewriter with regard to fluid thinking... certainly with regard to editing (and, yes, verbosity.)
But, sure, I plead guilty to increased stupidity, and I blame no one but Google. But I'm glad it's not just me.

The article was also interesting for its discussion of the impact of the mechanical clock (I've never been a fan.)

And finally, it was enlightening to learn the extent of Google's ambitions... Much as I love Google, it's a wee bit scary to think that their long-term business plan may be to implant their product in our brains, or even supplant our brains with it... Not sure how I feel about that one.

3 AM...

... has really been a key player in this election so far. That's when Obama's text message finally rolled in, 12 hours before his speech with Biden in Springfield, Illinois.
An ironic take on the 3 AM phone call -- perhaps a message to supporters that we ourselves need to stay vigilant as well?
(As a hopeless night owl, I actually was still just turning in when I heard the phone, but I don't know how many other East Coasters caught it.)
Or was it just that reporters had discovered the Secret Service agents dispatched to Biden's house and the story was appearing online, so the Obama team had to send it out in a hurry so supporters couldn't complain that we weren't in fact "the first to know?"
I guess I was among the first to know when I read the A.P. story on Yahoo, but I wish I'd gotten the message first. But that's what happens when you get reporters worked up into a lather like that. I'd personally thought the message would go out Friday, but I guess they didn't want it hashed over too much before the speech.
Well, it was pretty close, anyway.

The Barbara Walters School of Sportscasting

I admit to having enjoyed the trend toward focusing on more "human interest" stories in Olympic coverage, back in the early '90s when it first began, but now, like all "human interest" journalism, it's getting out of hand.

Instead of waiting for the athletes who didn't fare so well in their events to calm down, take a shower, have some Gatorade and sit down for a few minutes to philosophize about how they'd done their best and were just excited to be competing in such great company, how they'd keep on doing their thing and may well be back in four years, losing athletes are now cornered immediately after their crushing defeat with a microphone shoved in their face, and are asked humiliating and almost soul-crushing questions, like "How does it feel to know that you've worked for this all your life, you came to the semi-finals as a gold-medal contender and then, having let your place in the finals slip away through some careless error, will not be able to compete, thus breaking your mother's heart and betraying your country, and now that you are old and washed up with no chance in 2012, you may as well go drown yourself in the Yangtze?"
OK, I'm paraphrasing. But not by much.

And then there's the close-up, waiting for the tears. In bygone days, the camera would politely turn away after the first tear fell, but, no, these days, it waits about a minute, until the poor 16-year-old diver has apologized about three times for breaking down on camera, while the correspondent makes sympathetic noises but does not remove the microphone from its position shoved in the poor girl's face.
For the third time, she's just -- sob -- happy to be here.
Isn't there an opening for these journalists in election coverage?

Now, that's journalistic dedication

Georgian TV reporter carries on with her report almost immediately after being shot by a sniper while discussing the arrival of humanitarian aid in Gori.

The sniper bullet grazes her; she goes down; and moments later is sitting in the van rather calmly discussing it.

Test Your News IQ

from Pew Research Center:

Fun; just 12 questions. But, no, I didn't get a perfect score :(
Didn't do too bad, though.

Tim Russert, RIP

As his colleague Tom Brokaw said, Russert's death came during a political campaign that he loved. He was recording voiceovers for Sunday's show when he collapsed.

He knew how to get a tough interview out of anybody. He will truly be missed.

NBC's Tim Russert dead at 58.

We are not amused.

I agree with Deborah Howell. "Tongue in cheek" and self-deprecating opinion pieces do not come with a moral attached (in the case of Charlotte Allen's piece, that women really are stupid after all, and should stay out of politics, being content, I guess, to gaze at pinups of their favorite politicians from the safety of their kitchens.) Maybe I (and all those Post readers who flooded the editors' inbox) are just sensitive right now (Sensitive! Yes! We're women :-P) but if this is a "tongue in cheek" humor piece, it's lacking a punchline.
Allen's premise seems to be that, since some women get a little too worked up at Obama rallies, (yeah, he's a good-looking guy, and unfortunately, unlike men, some members of our gender are susceptible to attractiveness in the opposite sex) therefore we're all a bunch of hysterical dimwits.
I don't find the following nonsequitur all that rib-tickling: "The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence."
If Charlotte Allen wants to call herself stupid, (I'll admit she has a tendency to display gaping holes in logic) then she can speak for herself -- as she does here: "I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own."
And then, "I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men."
And those skills are meaningless? The only skills that matter are the ones at which men statistically excel? That bill of goods sounds familiar. (All women who excel at these other skills, or excel in a spectacular way at any skill, even prissy, frou frou ones like memory and language, are "outliers," according to Allen -- yep, George Eliot and Elizabeth I, Sappho, and Margaret Thatcher were barely women at all. Well, of course... One refused to marry and the other called herself George. It all makes sense. And Sappho was a lesbian. I'll leave Margaret Thatcher alone for now. But Allen is obviously the rare exception of an analytical female, if she can see through these historic women's accomplishments -- each not just equal but superlative in her field -- and conclude that they were merely freaks of nature.)
Yeah, too bad women these days can't take a joke. It must be a hardwired deficiency in our ability to delight in tired, warmed-over insults in a transparent new guise.

The Undervalued Role of Play

Not to sound too crotchety, but every time I see a DVD player in the back of an SUV, presumably lulling the kids back there either to sleep or into docile DVD-consciousness, I wonder what's going to become of the imagination in generations to come.
Apparently, Alix Spiegel of NPR's Morning Edition wondered the same thing.
Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

More on humor, fear, postmodernism, Republicans, overanalysis, bears, etc.

On further reflection, perhaps Colbert, a Gen X-er who attended college in the '80s, is, in addition to the earning of a respectable living through the facilitation of laughter, attempting to deconstruct the news. Why didn't I think of it before?

Unfortunately, as with Western philosophy and literary theory, I don't know if cable/mainstream journalism is going to deconstruct itself (to reveal a newborn Walter Cronkite sitting on a lotus, underneath it all) so much as slowly and crappily devolve to the level of Fox News (although PBS may hold out for awhile... as Bush said in his remarks on the economy earlier this week, "I'm an optimistic people.")

But to prove I haven't completely forgotten how to laugh in the presence of a Republican presidential candidate, these lines from a McCain event today made me giggle, even more than the letter he likes to mention from the former drunken sailor who resents being compared to members of Congress.

OK, and I laughed at Huckabee on Colbert, too. But the prospect of him as our next president still scares the hell out of me. OK, McCain scares me a little bit, too. The last pol known to have broached the subject of criminal human-bear relations was Scooter Libby.

MCCAIN: And what happened? We presided over the largest increase in the size of government in history, but more importantly -- more importantly -- we allowed corruption to creep into the way we did business, my friends, and we've got to fix it. And as president, I'm going to fix it.

You know, a few years ago, we spent $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana.

Now, I don't know if that's a paternity issue or a criminal issue...

The Colbert Bump

First of all, I may as well take this opportunity to express my joy that Stewart/Colbert are back on the air, even if things are a bit weird both for them and their viewers (not to mention the writers) in light of the continuing strike.

That said, what exactly is Colbert thinking with this free publicity for Huckabee? Sure, he's a nice guy and his sense of humor plays well on the show, but is that worth endorsing the darling of the social conservatives of the Far Right?

I hope Colbert isn't just doing this for the free laughs, because, just like his questionable foray into joke-candidacy, they come at some price for the nation outside of TV-land.

Which is evidenced by this straight-faced article on CNN.com, a further blurring of the lines between real and joke news. As much as I love Colbert, I didn't find it all that funny.

Quote du Jour: Hillary Clinton, "I found my own voice."

I almost got a little weepy myself when I heard that line from New Hampshire last night, just because it's what I've been hoping for ever since she started this campaign.

Yeah, I know the woman who brought on the so-called "tear heard 'round the world" voted for Obama, in the end, explaining that the human moment she was seeking in Hillary was fleeting in the skilled politician. But, to me, that means about as much to the New Hampshire outcome (if you'll forgive the awkwardly limited analogy) as Norma "Jane Roe" McCorvey regretting her abortion means to the validity of Roe v. Wade as a judicial precedent.

The point is that, when the chips were down, New Hampshire voters saw, not an alternate strategy emerging, because even the "Clinton machine" doesn't work that fast, but a glimpse of something genuine from Hillary herself, and this resonated with, not just women, but independent voters and young voters, people who maybe wanted to like Hillary and get to know her, but weren't so sure Hillary wanted to be liked or known.

She and the voters were kind of like two kids in high school who dig each other but aren't quite sure how far out on a limb they should go in expressing it (yeah, I'm all about the brilliant analogies tonight... my apologies. I was up following last night's damn NH coverage well past midnight ;)

So, yeah, everybody, including me, got the GOP race right (except just how much McCain would come back by) and everybody, including me, got the Dems all wrong. But then everybody, including me, was pretty much just reading the polls, and watching pundits rehash the polls. And nobody was polling at the moment when everything changed.

Who knows what will happen next? I can't even project what my own vote will be when I finally cast it in one of the less influential primaries next month. I've certainly given up trying to guess what anybody else is going to do.

But I can say for sure that I heartily endorse this article by Erica Jong from the Huffington Post:

Tears & Fears

Let's just learn patience and try not to predict the outcomes in this amazing year. Yes, pundits have to pund. Columnists need to fill up columns. TV newsreaders need to seem prescient. But maybe we can't predict the changes that have surged in America as we watched rich, old, white men lie and cheat and steal elections, as we watched them enrich their cronies while impoverishing average Americans, as we saw their hunger for oil and their disdain for our lovely green planet, as we watched, horrified, as Mr. Kerry and Ms. Pelosi feared changing course more than they feared the Repugnicans.

So now we have to do the hardest thing of all: not rush to judgment, wait, cultivate watchfulness not opinion mongering. Can we do it?

Our democracy may depend on it.

Kafka had this word over his desk: WARTEN (WAIT). Every writer must learn to do that while the unconscious works and underground forces prevail. Maybe countries have to do that too.

And while I'm wearing my feminist hat...

(Don't ask what kind of hat ;)

... I saw Susan Faludi interviewed by Marie Arana, Washington Post Book World editor, on C-SPAN yesterday regarding her new book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.

It was a fascinating discussion of how, in Faludi's view, the U.S. psychological reaction was defined by the assignment of regressive gender roles. The discussion also placed this reaction in the historical context of captivity narratives dating from the early frontier days, comparing the revision and co-opting of captivity stories like that of Cynthia Ann Parker with that of Jessica Lynch, and the historical frontier women's self-reliance with that of the female first responders on 9/11, whose efforts were written out of the story by the resurgence of the gender-exclusive terms "firemen" and "policemen" to describe the World Trade Center heroes.

Congressman Wexler's Sad Little Press Conference...

... about the quixotic dream of Cheney impeachment hearings.

It consisted of him, the guy who wrote a book on the subject, and maybe two or three other reporters.

But the guy who wrote a book on the subject made a good point on why this is the case.

Where was Kucinich, though? It's not like he's been invited to any debates lately.

DAVE LINDORFF: Let me follow that up. As you may know, I wrote the book, "The Case for Impeachment," with Barbara Olshansky.

REP. ROBERT WEXLER (D-FL): Yes.

LINDORFF: Since we've written it, we've been deluged with people asking us why isn't Congress acting; why is the media not -- you know, for instance, that book never got a single mainstream media review.

(LAUGHTER)

WEXLER: Is that so?

LINDORFF: Yes. And you know, people ask why is this; why is this?

And one of the things that people suggest -- and I wanted to bounce this off you -- is that both the leadership in Congress and the editors and reporters in the mainstream media have a fear that they are so complicit in the various issues that you've raised, you know, the spying, particularly the buildup to war, and even the outing of Valerie Plame, that -- in the case of the media -- that they don't want to see these things exposed the way they would be in impeachment hearings.

What are they putting in Joe Scarborough's "Morning Joe"?

He was acting awful loopy during this interview with John Edwards yesterday... Good thing Mika Brzezinski was there to nervously laugh off his line about Republicans. Maybe it was truth serum. If only Fox News used the same catering people.

BRZEZINSKI: What do you make of what's going on in the Republican Party, with the surge of Governor Huckabee?

And some analysts might say that the Republicans don't know what they want yet, but Huckabee seems to be sticking, at least for now, and is winning heavily in several states...

(RAUCOUS LAUGHTER FROM SCARBOROUGH)

BRZEZINSKI: What?

SCARBOROUGH: Republicans never know what they want.

BRZEZINSKI: Well...

SCARBOROUGH: Other than war. We want war.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, (OFF-MIKE) Don't listen to him.

(LAUGHTER)

What do you make of Governor Huckabee's surge so far?

What do you think voters are responding to here?

EDWARDS: Oh, I have to be honest. I don't spend a lot of time following what's happening on the Republican side...

(LAUGHTER)

BRZEZINSKI: That's smart.

Writer's Strike Update P.3: A good summary...

... of why mediocrity abounds in Hollywood despite talented writers, and what those writers can do about it (hold onto their copyrights for dear life, forego those Faustian "up-front fees.")

Writer's Strike Update

Week Two

Related:
Speaking of writers...
Almost the Daily Show...

Almost the Daily Show...

... for those like myself who need a fix before 2008 (an early prediction for when the strike will end.)

Not the Daily Show, With Some Writer