Department of the Missing Media Critique

I couldn’t pass up commenting on this NYT op-ed "Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt" by Julie Zhuo. Basically, Zhuo equates anonymity online with trolling. How much better it would be, she thinks, if we attached our real names to our posts and comments. What makes this especially rich is that Zhuo works for Facebook, a site notorious for its poor privacy controls. So I suppose if we all used our real names it might not improve "civility" on the internet, like that should be a priority anyway, but it would certainly solve a problem for Facebook. Read below the fold...

The most recent release of wikileaks docs has provoked all the standard reactions we have come to expect. The punditocracy, both governmental and media, have thrown everything they could think of at them hoping something will stick.

We are told that the docs are an attack on our national security and not just that but the international community. Then we are told often by the same people that they are of no importance, that they are full of mistakes and inaccuracies, that they are essentially gossip, that foreign leaders say even worse and more impolitic things about our leaders. Read below the fold...

Okay, I made myself sit through the interminable Maddow/Stewart interview tonight. Still trying to wrap my mind around what Stewart was going for with his “Rally for Sanity.” He has a lot of well-earned loyalists, including me.

Stewart asserts to Maddow that after 12 years he felt he deserved the right to let Americans know who he really is. I say, thank you, Jon, for waiting 12 years to do it. Your show was and still is the most moral show on the air. A cathartic outlet for national rage over the amorality and incompetence in our leadership, both Dem and Repub. Read below the fold...

This week soft-spoken, corporate media favored talking head historian Michael Beschloss appeared on Rachel Maddow to help her characterize the presidency of Barack Obama as a great one. I vented about that shark jump here.

Now, tonight on pbs' The Newshour Michael Beschloss inspires further jaw-dropping by declaring that the message from the people to Barack Obama in the 2010 midterms is that he should have governed from a MORE "centrist" position. WTF?

One more nail in the coffin of the still-born campaign liberalism that never survived to the Barack presidency. That never grew beyond the twinkle in millions of Americans hopeful eyes. Read below the fold...

The last time I beat Glenn Greenwald by a day in writing on the NYT John Burns' hit piece on wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Read below the fold...

On October 26, 2010, the NYT reported that Tariq Aziz had been sentenced to death by an Iraqi court. Aziz went back to the beginning with Saddam and was both his foreign minister and then was moved up to deputy prime minister. What I wanted to write about is how the Times story gets it wrong and misses the real story. Read below the fold...

Ezra Klein did a piece yesterday offering the conventional deficit dove position on deficits and debt. Here's a commentary on it.

Gallup's survey of voter preferences for closing the entitlement gap is incomplete It suggests the options on entitlements are like a second-grade arithmetic problem: You can either add stuff (tax increases) or subtract stuff (benefit cuts). What's missing is the option you learn about in high school: growth.

Read below the fold...

On Friday, the Government reported its 2010 Fiscal Year results. Here are some fragments from a “news” article in WaPo by Vincent Del Giudice.

The U.S. government posted its second straight annual budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion as lingering unemployment constrained tax revenue.

The shortfall totaled $1.294 trillion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, second only to the $1.416 trillion deficit in 2009, the Treasury Department said today in Washington. . . .

. . . The national debt totals more than $13 trillion, exceeding the size of the economy, unadjusted for inflation. . . .

Read below the fold...

This is Part Two of a critical review of The National Journal's Debate on "Our Fiscal Future" between John Podesta and Douglas Holtz-Eakin with Jim Tankersley moderating, at The George Washington University's Jack Morton Auditorium. This part provides more observations and evaluation on some of the propositions offered by Holtz-Eakin and Podesta.

H-E: Eliminating tax cuts for the rich will cost 1.5% to 2% GDP annually. Read below the fold...

Tuesday night, I thought I'd attend The National Journal's Debate on "Our Fiscal Future" between John Podesta and Douglas Holtz-Eakin with Jim Tankersley moderating at The George Washington University's Marvin Center. I was interested because Podesta is often thought to be on the left-wing of “mainstream” opinion, and also it is said that he is one of the leading possibilities to succeed Rahm Emanuel as the President's Chief of Staff. So, I wanted to see if I could find some glimmer of novelty in the point of view he expressed; some indication that he might bring some new thinking into The White House beyond what Obama has been hearing from say, Austan Goolsbee. Read below the fold...

McClatchy covered the story, on September 13, 2010. Pravda, oddly, or not, never did. Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics.

In his commentary The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party last week on Jane Mayer’s important New Yorker article on how the Koch brothers and their monstrous business enterprises have financed the conservative movement and libertarianism in the United States, Frank Rich, mentioned a new book by Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal. Read below the fold...

In a Volatility blog thread entitled Kleptodicy and the NYT’s New Public Editor, Jake Chase opines that other commenters' expectations regarding this momentous appointment, low as they are, are unlikely to be met, and suggests a suitable response: Read below the fold...

After all, he's our favorite Republican! Read below the fold...

Gee, I wonder why. Read below the fold...