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Our Magic Media

In the Old Days before the WaPo decided to become an upscale Washington Times and Rupert Murdoch single-handedly LCD'd the MSM, there were major oil spills, too. They caused lots of trouble and cost lots of money to clean up and many homes and businesses were ruined because the press didn't use its powers correctly.

Media Quiz: Which Mainstream News Org Is In the Tank to BP?

Sometimes the dfference between a real news organization and an increasingly pretend news organization is so clear you don't even have to read the stories themselves to know which one is deep in the corporate tank. Here are two headlines that illustrate the point nicely, both of them lead stories of the hour for their respective papers.

29 Dead While Mineowners Duck Fines

Well, now we know. Of the 31 people in the mine when it exploded, 2 lived and 29 didn't. The press will now go through the obligatory and inevitable post-mortem in which they finally deign to notice problems they just didn't have time to bother with as long as, you know, only a few people died because of them. They're only interested when a lot of people die. That's sexy, I guess, and one or two is just, like, boooooring. As for shameless flouting of health and safety laws? Yawn.

This week's blast comes after a year in which the Upper Big Branch mine had repeated problems with methane buildups. Since April 2009, federal regulators have cited the mine eight times for "substantial" violations relating to the mine's methane control plans, according to the records.

In two instances, the regulators found the mine operator was calibrating methane monitors every three months even though it is supposed to be done every 31 days. The delays in attending to the monitors meant they could not properly detect the gas, a risk inspectors said could lead to severe injuries or prove fatal.

On April 30, 2009, federal regulators found that the mine had failed to follow methane-related safety precautions. Regulators stopped work in a section of the mine until the ventilation was corrected.

The NYT, for instance, just got around to doing a little investigative work and discovered - surprise! - that Massey Energy, them what owns the mine, has been much more concerned about fighting all the fines they've been wracking up than they were about making sure the pisspoor safety conditions actually got, you know, fixed.

Banking Reform: We Can Do It If We Want To, We Just Don't Want To

OK, so Krugman isn't wild about Dodd's banking reform bill. Nevertheless he is bending over backwards to make it sound better than it is.

[H]ow good is the legislation on the table, the bill put together by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut?

Not good enough. It's a good-faith effort to do what needs to be done, but it would create a system highly dependent on the wisdom and good intentions of government officials. And as the history of the last decade demonstrates, trusting in the quality of officials can be dangerous to the economy's health.

"Good faith effort"? That's pushing the benefit of the doubt past the breaking point. The admittedly minimal House bill was a "good faith effort" if your definition of "good faith" is an effort to just barely control the worst of Wall Street's usual financial scams, shenanigans, and skullduggery. Dodd's bill is a bad faith effort to make non-reform smell like reform, thus keeping Wall Street happy with him so his life-after-the-Senate will be a very comfortable one.

Kabuki Wins! Next Up: More Kabuki (Updated)

As carefully choreographed as it was, there was still some slight fear in the insurance community that healthcare "reform" might actually end up reforming something. This morning the NYT Business section was crowing with delight that insurers had dodged a bullet aimed in the opposite direction. This is the first sentence:

With a sweeping overhaul of the nation's health care system, Congress would be giving the health care industry as many as 32 million additional paying customers in the next few years.

So "overhaul" is now defined as providing victims for health insurance ripoff teams. Glad they got their priorities straight. I was concerned that somebody might think it necessary to rein in obscene profits and dirty tricks but it turns out that wasn't even on the agenda, let alone at the top of it. Here's what was:

Business Schools Considering Classes in Critical Thinking? I Don't Think So

The NYT Business Section's mindless acceptance of any corporate utterance, no matter how inane or flatly untrue, sometimes leads to unintentional hilarity. James Clay Fuller ran across one such article in last Sunday's Times in which a reporter code-named "Lane Wallace" wrote a breathless piece on how America's corporate training grounds, the "business" schools, are now going to begin encouraging "critical thinking" in future corporate scam artists - oops, sorry - executives by offering classes in Critical Thinking.

Yeah. That'll work. Fuller thought the whole idea was hilarious.

Saving Mortgages Is Bad For Banks So Obama Should Quit Doing It

Of course. What else would you expect from Big Business stooge Peter Goodman? The Federal mortgage loan program that was aimed at saving thr homes of people who'd been scammed by the banksters for the sake of quick dirty $$$ was never big enough, wasn't well sold by the Admin, and didn't cover anything like the number of victims it needed to cover to reverse what the banksters had done. So, naturally, it never should have been in the first place because it's counterproductive.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.

And who are these "experts"? Turns out they're the same sick, greedy fucks that produced this crisis in the first place. Does that surprise you?

Friday Palin: Palin/Beck in 2012? Happy New Year!

I know your first reaction is probably the same as mine: Is this a joke? Wishful thinking? The answer is, No. La Cuda has actually proposed the idea seriously, and on no less a Prime News Outlet than Newsmax.

In an interview with Newsmax, Sarah Palin floated Fox News host Glenn Beck's name as her running mate for 2012. Palin said, "But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way." Apparently, Palin's qualifications for a running mate include that they be a "hoot."

Palin chuckled when asked about the possibility of a Palin/Beck ticket and said, "I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I'm not there yet. But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he's so bold – I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he's very, very, very effective."

Sarahcuda describing Todd's...equipment

I know. I started pumping my fist in the air and praying to the Great Spaghetti Monster immediately. This is practically a starved-for-entertainment liberal's wet dream. It's Obama-porn - or would be if the Democrat party had a clue that this isn't 1993 any more, which it doesn't. They're still stuck back on Planet Gingrich, so it's unlikely they'll figure it out, but for those of us chained to reality this would be better than Spiderman and Avatar combined.

Please, GSM, please please please make this happen. Or I'll stop believing in you. ("Threat negotiating" courtesy of Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln, who taught me everything I know about extortion.)

Government by Kabuki Fools NYT Completely - Or Not

Or maybe it's just pretending.

Anyone who looks objectively at the healthcare "reform" debacle realizes that the Democrats never intended to pass a public option.

[T]he "effort" to get a Public Option was never a good faith effort. The administration actually told the press that talk of a public option was intended solely as a threat to use against the insurance companies in order to try to make them feel sweeter about a little tinkering to reduce costs a little. That's it. That's all the administration ever intended to offer us, in spite of the fact that they were already giving the insurance companies the gift of millions more suckers who would be forced to buy their crappy product despite the fact that they were the least likely ever to need it. (And the rest of the new suckers would be people who were in no position to fight to get what they'd been forced to pay for.)

But to the daredevil investigators of the NYT (whose sole source would appear to be Rahm Emanuel), Obama was forced to accept a bad bill because it's the best he could get.

After weeks of frustrating delays and falling poll numbers, Mr. Obama decided to take what he could get, declare victory and claim momentum on some of the administration’s biggest priorities, even if the details did not always match the lofty vision that underlined them.

From Copenhagen to Capitol Hill, the president determined the outer limits of what he could accomplish on climate change and health care and decided that was enough, at least for now. He brokered a nonbinding agreement with other world powers to fight global warming, averting the collapse of an international summit meeting. And he blessed a compromise on health care to guarantee the votes needed to pass the Senate.

He gave up the game before it had even started, handing defeat to conservatives on a silver platter garnished with dead crows and roses, but NYT "analyst" Peter Baker only sees what his Villager-view allows him to see: poor President Obama. He just wanted too much too soon.

Union Backtalk at Delphi

Well well well. It seems that after 30 years of abuse it's finally paying off to be the member of a union, and the "I spit on unions - pah! pah! - what have unions ever done except take dues money?" crowd ain't at'all happy about it. To quote chief NYT whiner Bruce Gump, "I’m being thrown out with yesterday’s trash." Mr Gump's complaint? Union members at his company are having their pensions fully paid out while Mr Gump and his fellow non-union members might have theirs cut. Too bad.