Senate Passes Omnibus Spending Bill

Good. Let's get this the hell out of the way and move forward. The earmark debate is so side-splittingly misinformed I can hardly stand it. Even Eric Boehlert couldn't hold off the stupid today. It's not just that earmarks are a small percentage of the bill, maybe 1-2%. It's that their inclusion in a spending bill DOESN'T CHANGE THE OVERALL AMOUNT OF SPENDING. Earmarks are a technical term of art whereby representatives of the people direct small pieces of funding instead of government bureaucrats. It kills me that it takes Bob Frickin' Bennett to point out this fact, which kind of makes the whole debate completely pointless.

BENNETT: First, let me make several things clear that you perhaps don't understand. Number one, if the money were not earmarked for this purpose it would still be spent. That is, the Department of Agriculture would be spending it somewhere else. And you would not be saving a dime if you eliminate these earmarks.

Is that so damn hard? Why can't one Democratic lawmaker, or anyone from the Obama Administration, make this simple point. After that, all you're arguing about is the size of the spending. And given that the economy is falling off a cliff and no other sector is creating demand, you simply don't get far with an argument that government should be tightening its belt at this juncture. That would fall under things the willfully ignorant say, or to be redundant, things cable television news anchors say.

(By the way, I agree with exceedingly little in BoBo Brooks' article other than these sentences: "The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate." Brooks is so thick he actually contradicts himself on this later in the column.)

This whole debate has been a perfect example of the dumbing down of America.

Our Best Defense

At times like these, you can do nothing but laugh. And when you're done with that, you can laugh at CNBC, which has taken a major hit during this financial crisis, exposed as they are to be a cheap fraud.

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CNBC has no response because they couldn't possibly have a response. There's nothing that can be said. They are a network dedicated to offering zillionaire CEOs a platform to lie, and spinning pro-business and anti-worker policies as good for America. That's what they do, that's all they do. And when a crisis hits, they look foolish.



I actually thought the best takedown of them all was Stephen Colbert inviting Jim Cramer on The Colbert Report and then playing pictures of cute kittens and puppies behind whatever he said. That's basically CNBC in a nutshell leading up to this crisis, when Bush was still in office. They've only done a 180 now and gone market populist because they think they're protecting their bottom lines. CNBC is a farce, and Colbert basically proved it last night.

Good For Rachel Maddow

She is officially a force on the cable scene, and I can hardly wait for the Maddow imitators to pop up. Imagine, someone that can hold an intelligent conversation on cable news. The other thing about this is that Maddow's beliefs are extremely well-known at the outset - there's no need to read in to anything. This isn't some accidental liberal making his or her way onto the teevee.

It's still a pretty lonely outpost, of course. Maddow isn't a Villager.

...I do hope that, after the election, Maddow puts her intellect to good use and starts dissecting the actual issues facing the country. She has a strong grasp of them, but I imagine the MSNBC "Place for Politics" personality is constricting her. Obviously the election is going to swamp coverage for the next two weeks, but I hope that afterwards she presents a picture of what can be possible in cable news.

Rachel's Gift

We're into week 2 of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and the ratings are strong. She continues to beat Larry King, both in the demo and overall; she's already getting three times the viewers of Glenn Beck; and she actually beat her lead-in Keith Olbermann on Tuesday night. Rachel is nowhere near Hannity & Colmes yet, but the show is only two weeks old.

I've been TiVo'ing it and watching, and I have to say that it's unlike anything else on cable news. Olbermann comes out of the cable tradition, and his internal rivalries with the likes of O'Reilly and Limbaugh set it in a certain shoutfest space (even though he never has on anybody who disagrees with him, which I think is actually a mistake). Maddow's show is completely different. It's relentlessly factual, engaging and while it has a point of view, it uses argument over bluster to make it. It's quite extraordinary, not only because she manages to expose someone like Tom Frank to the cable-watching world, but because it's a show that uses complete sentences and actually foregrounds facts. Not to mention that it shares Maddow's taste for the absurd, like the story yesterday about 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars being rolled back to $100, for example.

It's a really impressive achievement so far.

Cable News Drives The Boat

Some bloggers are pushing this report of sagging ratings for the cable nets - in the midst of this election year - as evidence of traditional media decline. I'm not so sure. First of all I think that a lot of people have primary fatigue, though the year-over-year decline suggests there's something bigger at work.

But here's the thing. Cable news impacts the nightly news. A lot of the commentators are the same, and NBC, for example, has pretty much the same staff. As we saw with the ABC debate, the network news isn't exactly better at rising above the fluff. Cable news also impacts the morning news. It's not the viewership so much as who watches, and what happens on the casble nets rises up to that morning agenda. And most important, cable news impacts the LOCAL news. Local news outlets have virtually no budget for stories of national significance. Lots of them re-air things from CNN or NBC News or their national outlet. People like Fox News' Chris Wallace do news hits on morning stations all over the country. So what the cable nets are covering impacts practically all broadcast news outlets. And Americans still get the majority of their news from television, even though that's changing.

And what are the cable nets covering? A pelican getting stuck in a tree, which suggests that the local news is bouncing back on cable news, too.

People are dying in Iraq. You need a credit check to buy gas. Your home belongs to the bank now. But stop the fucking presses, ‘cause there’s a pelican in a freakin’ tree!

Doesn't cost any money to run a local news feed. That's the point here. It's all driven by money. Talking heads are cheap. Re-running local stories is cheap. Journalism costs. They don't want to spend it.

Pentagon Pundits Yield No Punditry

It's fairly embarrassing that Jon Stewart managed to beat most national news outlets in reporting recent stories about the Pentagon-aided pundits embedded in the major media. (I should note that USA Today had an op-ed on this today). Of course, this isn't the only story where there's been media silence; Helen Thomas had to pull an "at long last, have you no decency" on the White House press corps for their failure to question the executive branch about their top leaders directing and authorizing torture. Still, their refusal to investigate the pundit story is more revealing - because the media itself is culpable for this one. Here's Glenn Greenwald.

Media organizations simply ignore -- collectively blackout -- any stories that expose major corruption in their news reporting, as evidenced by the fact that no major network or cable news programs have ever meaningfully examined the fundamental failures of the media in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. As Bill Moyers noted at the beginning of his truly superb documentary on the media-government collaboration concerning the invasion: "The story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television." Thus, one of the most significant political stories of this generation -- what Moyers described as "our press largely surrender[ing] its independence and skepticism to join with our Government in marching to war" -- has simply been rendered invisible by our largest media outlets. That scandal just does not exist, particularly on television.

This is happening because of the stunning level of media consolidation that we've seen over the past several decades. In past years there would be multiple newspapers in one town, all with their own sources and their own desire to beat the competition. Now Rupert Murdoch owns the majority of the papers in New York, the sources are largely all the same, and this is even more acute on broadcast media. It's a kind of unwritten pact between them all not to report on something like this and expose the official corruption that exists. And of course, the decimation of news bureaus nationwide means that there are fewer and fewer independent analysts within the media, meaning that they must outsource their commentary to Pentagon sources like this. We've seen more and more official sources used as news, more stories that read as Administration press releases. The media is extremely sensitive to their failure during the run-up to war, and they're not likely to give their critics any other chance to question them.

All of this is to say, don't expect a big mea culpa.