We need more Barney Franks

... especially if Newt Gingrich (R-stupid person's idea of a smart person) wins the Republican Presidential nomination.

Aphrodisiac of power

Bernie Goldberg is a tool. He has found a profitable niche that keeps him in face-puffing booze, paid for by wingnut welfare, and he's going to hammer it without regard for fairness. He and Ann Coulter have the same job, just different shticks.

Was Chris Matthews a lunatic for saying that Obama's speech made a thrill go up his leg? Damn straight. That blithering chatterer has issues, man. Alcohol seems to be one of his, but his propensity for man-crushes didn't start with Obama.

At many times before, Matthews has swooned over the manliness of Republicans - Duhbya (nice package, eh Chris!), Rudy Giuliani (so manly he looks good in a dress!), and of course John McCain (cut of his jib? Chris would sail him). If you look too closely at this, it's enough to make you say, "Eeeew!" This is a guy who'd want a date, not with George Clooney or Brad Pitt, but with Henry Kissinger. Barf.

Goldberg will never tell you this, though. He'll pretend that Matthews is a straight (heh) party-line liberal Democrat who only has man-crushes on Democrats. This is bullshit, the wingnut pundit's stock in trade.

Exceptional executives

And I mean exceptional in the sense that used to be a euphemism (and may still be) for the hardest special ed cases.

Donald Trump can't make money from gambling. Either that, or someone's skimming. I guess he is exceptional enough to have his own TV show alongside so many other blowhard, self-important jerks (Glenn Beck, anyone? How about Chris Matthews?).

In the category of that explains a lot:

[Las Vegas economic woes] led to a 10% decline in gaming revenues for Las Vegas casinos in 2008. (This year might not be much better either, especially if big banks receiving TARP money stop flying loan officers to Las Vegas for "annual recognition events.")

No wonder they all wanted in on the high-risk securitized mortgage market! Owww. (Atrios would add, "The stupid, it burns.")

Update: "You know the economy is bad when you can't count on gambling and hookers." --David Letterman

Lessons of experience

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

"Middle school melodrama"

This is real insight:

In this middle school melodrama, Fox News gives MSNBC wedgies and steals its lunch money, and MSNBC tries to act even tougher. (CNN is the National Merit Scholar who does the work, stays out of trouble, and is reliable but somewhat dull.)

The press likes the juvenile level of our political discourse. And if CNN is a National Merit Scholar, we are in a world of trouble.

The nightmare scenario

John McCain, the Republicans' great white-haired hope, is the last man standing. He picks Mike Huckabee to balance the ticket and reunite the bullies and the fundies. The wealthies decide that this is going to work for them.

We Democrats nominate Hillary, but the fight with Obama is too bitter to heal quickly. Hillary picks another bloodless centrist technocrat, say, Bill Richardson to balance the ticket, appeal to the Hispanic vote, and keep it in the Clintonista house.

Duhbya lies low. The swiftboaters find a picture of Hillary walking past a protester holding a sign that says, "Hanoi Hilton is too good for baby-killers," or whatever the Rovians want to Photoshop into it. The MSM says that they have to cover it since Drudge did and the story is in play. And anyway she should have ripped that sign up on the spot.

Sean Hannity wets himself with excitement. Chris Matthews slurs, "See, I told you she was an unfeeling bitch." Rush Limbaugh feels so good that he actually kicks the pills - except for Viagra, Cialis, and every other ED remedy he can shop for. Ann Coulter writes a book called Liberal Torturers, in which she lays all torture in the history of the West and most of the East at the feet of blood-sucking liberals. Inquisition? Liberal Jews in Spain. Jeanne D'Arc? The French, for chrissake. Salem witch trials? Massachusetts!! She appears on the cover as a dominatrix clad in studded black leather.

We need all this circus because the economy is totally in the shitter. The vacillating Dems in Congress fight Duhbya's $150 billion self-stimulus plan to leave no billionaire behind. Then they cave. The Republican media operation successfully blames the Dems for their one-month delay, despite the obvious fact that the stimulus where they applied it couldn't possibly have helped in the vital short run. For that, the money needed to go to people who would spend it, instead of just making their ill-advised investments whole and rewarding bad choices.

McCain wins, and nothing changes.

Nothing, that is, until the cancer comes back on his left cheek or until 2012, when he's 76 and too old to run for reelection.

Make way for President Huckabee!

I didn't say this had a happy ending.

Update: Found that picture!

Why newspapers are dying

There are many reasons for the slow wasting away of newspapers. One that has been missed is this: Newspapers were accustomed to being the only game in town, and the market for current events has become much more segmented than their traditional model.

Oh, sure, TV came along in the 1950s and brought competition. However, at the time, TV took its news values from print. It covered stories in something approaching depth, and it had pictures to boot. Still, there were only three networks, and they were broadcasting.

Even before cable, though, entertainment values oozed in. Remember weather girls? Now all news readers have to be beautiful. No more dour serious journalists. Sports segments got longer and longer. Eventually, the hard news pieces got softer to keep up, and network executives found that they could capture a lot more eyeballs with puppies and missing persons than with the arcana of the federal budget.

Still, newspapers didn't adjust their audience expectations. True, virtually all the evening papers closed, the need for them erased by the nightly news. But the big three were broadcasting to everyone, so newspapers continued to write for everyone.

The advent of cable TV news further segmented the market. It wasn't, of course, the only force. News magazines spawned celebrity gossip-zines.

Newspapers refused to give up their long lost broad audience, but cable started narrowcasting to niche audiences. Bill O'Reilly owns the delusional, ossified, egotistical gasbag segment, despite lots of competition, but even his audience is not very large. Multiplying him a hundred times (oh, god, please, NOOO!) chips a lot of eyeballs off the front page of the Boston Globe. Chris Matthews takes the blithering sexists with poor impulse control. Jon Stewart takes the kids who grew up with TV and already know it's all bullshit. Keith Olbermann wins people who want to giant slalom between news and punch lines, while Stewart is in a quick slalom.

Newspapers kept trying to be everything to everyone, and no matter how many soft features they add or news you can use they deliver about how to get your Christmas tree out the door without scratching the paint, they're still bleeding readers. They're even bleeding guys like me, and the reason is that they're in a niche market, too, but they haven't dealt with that yet.

Meanwhile, the core audience for newspapers, people like me who want deeper coverage of the news, even when there's no way to get good art, are finding less and less in them to justify the gray ink all over our hands. We want to know what actually happened yesterday. We don't want reporters striving for a scoop to pretend to know what's going to happen tomorrow or next week. We want some seasoned insight about what topics touch what other topics and the benefit of the reporter's contacts, as long as the reporter vets the quotes for bullshit and bluntly puts it in context.

Instead, newspapers are taking their news values from TV, which means they value entertainment more than information. Their medium is just not well-positioned to compete in entertainment (though the web is changing that).

True, the core readers of newspapers are not 100% of adults, not even close. But we're at least a quarter of the population, and we tend to be affluent, aware, and sometimes even influential, just the perfect eyeballs to deliver to advertisers.

And the papers are screwing that up, too, alienating us by trying to hang onto what they've already lost.

Duhbya and the pundits

Two things vividly on display on MSNBC's coverage of Duhbya's state of the escalation speech:

• From the beginning, Duhbya's goal in Iraq was to stay indefinitely in order to project American power throughout the region. This is still his number one goal.
  
• The media work in almost all cases to reinforce the conventional wisdom.

Duhbya triangulated his message, not his proposals. Rachel Maddow noticed the fakery of his empty offer to "come together" with both parties in Congress. (No doubt, some damn fool Democrats will be taken in.) He only wants them for photo ops, as always. The hundred years war in the Persian Gulf is already decided. Metric tons of concrete have already been poured. Duhbya's legacy will be a permanent deadly embrace.

Chris Matthews is irritating even when he takes positions I like. His function is blithering, impassioned statement of whatever the current trend is. There is no trend he can lead from core beliefs, also no bandwagon he will not leap eagerly aboard. He will never take responsibility for his past enthusiasms, no matter how badly they have now turned out. He will sneer at "mission accomplished" despite his drooling cheerleading for it. TV is ephemeral. So are Matthews's opinions. He expects us not to notice.

Where Matthews brings spittle and blather to his comments, Tim Russert tries to bring gravitas. But it's the kind of gravitas you might find in the Frasier Crane character at your own local bar - puffed up, self-serving, egotistical, and empty, but not nearly as funny as Kelsey Grammer.

Brian Williams is just an empty suit.

It's a wonder Keith Olbermann doesn't go nuts, surrounded by so many boneheads.