Fact-esque

Planet Money Finally Gets Enough Rope

I stopped listening to NPR's podcast, Planet Money, a while ago because I wasn't learning anything from listening to it.  Also, I found myself frequently annoyed by the cast's strangely dense affect that seemed to belie their apparent Chicago Boy bias.  The perfect example of that dichotomy came in an interview with, I think, Simon Johnson, when the interviewer, Adam Davidson, I think, compared the federal budget to a household budget (duh) and then asked if the government building roads wasn't Communism. Sigh.  Once I found out that Johnson, who actually is indispensible, started his own blog, Planet Money was off my playlist.  

All this to say that today Adam Davidson got hammered by the NPR ombudsman for the recent and infamous Planet Money shouting match/interview he did with Elizabeth Warren.  I'm glad I got off that train before the wreck.  It was easy to see coming.

"Liberal" NPR and Brennan's Resignation

Glenn Greenwald has become one of the foremost media critics in the blogosphere that media figures actually pay attention to and this week he turned his attention to NPR. In his Salon podcast interview with NPR's Tom Gjelten, Greenwald's questioning about Gjelten's handling of bloggers' criticisms clearly shows up yet another facet of media reporter's gullibility and laziness.

Greenwald asks Gjelten where he got the idea that liberal bloggers were objecting to Brennan's appointment as CIA Director simply because he happened to be at the Agency when renditions and torture were going on, approved by the Bush Admin?

Giant Pool of Money, the Sequel

Right now you can listen to This American Life's sequel to their stunningly simple and informative Giant Pool of Money episode for free here.  It'll cost you in a few days.  Giant Pool of Money explained how we got into the mess.   Another Frightening Show About the Economy helps you understand what's happening now:

Prologue.

Host Ira Glass goes to Union Square, a 15-minute subway ride from Wall Street, where it doesn't look like we're on the edge of an economic abyss. (3 minutes)

Act One. The Day the Market Died.

Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson recount the 36-hour period, two weeks ago, when the credit markets froze. Plus, what it’s like now for businesses to get short-term loans, and how the hardship is spreading to every sector of the economy. (16 minutes)

Act Two. Out of the Hedges and Into the Woods.

One more confusing financial product that’s bringing down the global economy. And one of way to think about this product is this: If bad mortgages got the financial system sick, this next thing you’re about to hear about, helped spread the sickness into an epidemic. These are "credit default swaps." Alex explains. (19 minutes)

Act Three. Swap Cops.

Ira talks with Michael Greenberger, a former commodities regulator, who tells the story of when it was decided not to regulate credit default swaps. And how that decision was emblematic of the way we didn’t regulate a lot of the toxic financial products we’re hearing about now. (8 minutes)

Song: "Bankrupt on Selling," Modest Mouse


Act Four. What's Next?

Ira and Adam answer the question: Was the $700 billion bailout bill signed into law today a good idea or a bad one? (10 minutes)

Tell your friends. 

OhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygod!!!

Listen to the hysteria in the voice of the NPR guy interviewing Sen. Shelby about the Trillion Dollar Plan to Save Hank Paulson's Friends. 

Are you saying that you might be willing, if it were up to you, to let the economy ride this out even if that means a very severe economic slowdown - a recession?!  A Depression?!

Are you concerned that even a day or two or a week's delay will cause trouble in the financial markets?

It looks like NPR guy is watching his mutual funds bounce around, doesn't like it at all and wants mama to make it better. 

Don't Walk Him, But Don't Give Him Anything to Hit

I just heard Cokie Roberts, serious journamalist, tell me that the Dems have to be careful:

The Democrats could do something things that could blow it.  The Congress could seem to be ineffectual or they could seem to be overreaching.  ...  (mentions Feingold's censure resolution and Reid's backing off of it) ... Things like that, um, if the Democrats seem to be just piling on a pres who's already at remarkably low approval ratings on a war that that public has turned their back on, if the Democrats pile on on that, that could be a problem.

Clever girl, our Cokie.  She hit the GOP trifecta:  She helpfully raised the Republican talking point of the "ineffectual Democratic Congress," she tied the efficacy of Congress to ending BushCo's Quagmire in Iraq without mentioning the Republican Quagmire in the Senate and then helpfully set up an impossible frame for the Democrats: They have to fix everything that BushCo has destroyed in the last six years except that they can't do it on their own or appear rude while doing so.  They have to get legislation passed by working politely with an obstructionist opposition party that was perfectly happy being a universal rubber stamp for Dear Leader and NOT PASSING A BUDGET THE LAST YEAR THEY WERE IN POWER.  They have to end a war of aggression without hurting the feelings of the maniac who started it.  They have to balance, weave, dodge and frolic and when they do, it still won't be enough to win accurate coverage in the corporate media. 

That's because the corporate meda despises not the Democratic party, which is nothing more than a marginally less cooperative lapdog of global corporate interests, but its base, which is comprised of the poor and middle class, who, with just the tiniest bit of encouragement, may wake up to fact that they are worth something as human beings.  They may realize that their children do not have to die from a cavity - that they do not need to lose their homes to pay medical bills - that they deserve universal single-payer health care and reform of the Barriers to Bankruptcy Bill and an energy policy that creates jobs and a healthy planet - that their boats have not risen with the latest economic tide - that they are losing the class war on every front - that there is power in numbers.

So Cokie Roberts and NPR and every other corporate minion keeps muddling the story just enough so that even people who think they are informed don't really understand the stakes of the game and strategies of the people playing it.  This is not the role of a free press in a democracy.  This is the role of a corporate press in a kleptocracy.

UPDATE: Atrios mentions the contempt with which the YouTube debate is being handled in the corporate media.   Quel suprise.  That the hideous element may get it into their heads that they have access to power and maybe even some power themselves is a dangerous thought indeed.

Oh Boy

I just heard the NPR morning headlines.

Exxon Mobile has posted the largest annual profit in the history of American business.   

The Senate resolution regarding BushCo's War on Iraq was modified to assure Republicans that Democrats wouldn't stop funding troops currently in country.   Now that's what I call some yummy GOP framing. 

Iran is providing Iraqis with very sophisticated explosives being used to attack US GIs.  It won't be the first time a world power provided sophisticated explosives to the enemies of America.

Support Reasonable People and Reject Extremists

I heard an announcer on NPR, leader of your liberal media, helping BushCo out by rephrasing his incredibly stupid and embarassing  "the "right guy" comment as "the right man."   I remember a big to-do a few years back about reporters rephrasing athletes' comments to make them sound smarter.  It was decided that that was the wrong thing to do.  Ethics and all, don't you know.

Here's some more grand eloquence and deep thinking from today's press conference:

PRESIDENT BUSH: My advice is, support reasonable people and reject extremists. Understand that most people want to live in peace and harmony and security. It's very important for the American people to understand that most Muslim mothers want their children to grow up in peace, and they're interested in peace. And it's in our interest to help liberty prevail in the Middle East, starting with Iraq.

And that's why this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all. We're going to help this government. And I'm able to say that it is -- that we have a government that wants our help and is becoming more capable about taking the lead in the fight to protect their own country. The only way that Iraq is going to be able to succeed is when the Iraqis, led by a capable person, says, we're tired of it, we don't want violence, we want the peace that our 12 million people voted for. And it's in the world's interest that Iraq succeed.

No matter who succeeds this moron, s/he'll sound like Winston Churchill in comparison. 

 

When you spend half your waking life beating the CIA in three-dimensional chess, finding little FBI teeth sunk into your own trouser leg is, at best, a pesky distraction.

Harry Shearer, the best political satirist out there, knows exactly  what's wrong with the NYT.  This is some of his song,  Miss Run Amok  (Jagged  Edge's Girls Gone Wild):

I'm the queen of the newsroom,
my colleagues I greet with gloom.
They came in with a new broom but me it couldn't sweep.
I'm the one they had to keep 'cuz I've got the access.
When I'm around the Veep relaxes, ignores taxes and just leaks.
I'm the open ear he seeks.
It's through me the leakage courses.
I got all the secret sources.
I was in the armed forces,
embedded up to here, wore the uniform to cheer
and to back up my supporting I even dabbled in reporting.

Miss Run Amok, that's what they call me at the paper.
I'm capable of any caper till I run out of luck.
Miss Run Amok.
Not the name I write under but my words crack with thunder.
Till you wonder what I'm smoking or sucking
'cuz the plums I was plucking
had to come from something more than pluck.
From Miss Run Amok.

I'm the queen of the newsroom
the one they couldn't not groom
Even though I wrote "Valerie Plume" or was it "Flame"?
I can't remember.  Taking notes is such a drag
each word a dying ember
Who said what and when
It's not my bag.  What's then is then.
So I'm a pal of Chalabi.
He had a tall tale or two for me.
Some say I should have checked it out, showed some doubt
but if I'd put him in a cage, put a hold on his outrage,
kept his notions off the stage, pulled the curtain,
only one thing is certain:
no matter how prudent or sage,
I wouldn't have made the front page.

There's more and it's all just as dead on.   You can hear it  here.

And if you really want to laugh, check out the 10/9 episode of Le Show, Shearer's weekly radio broadcast.  At around thirty three minutes, he's got a Dick Cheney: Confidential about the VP office spy scandal that's fall-down funny.   

Cheney's voice:  "There are no leaves around the secure, undisclosed location.  So the only way the approach of autumn impinges on my finely tuned consciousness is the dropping of shoes.  The Iraqi Constitution was one of the those little pieces of conceptual footware.  I tell ya' Sysiphus didn't have heavier lifting.  First we got'em to sit down together, then to avoid all sorts of deadlines enshrined in Jerry Bremer's neat little transitional law deal they had to avoid actually reading the full text of the Constitution to Parlaiment.  Then change the rules to make it harder to defeat.  And then the week, Mr. John Bolton couldn't keep the hairless Yorkies at the U.N. from yapping up a storm, we had to get our Iraqi friends to change the rules back again.  All this while the Constituent in Chief was busy doing his Look How Much I Care About the Gulf Cost Tour.  Plus, with Mick Brown doing a heckuva less of a heckuva job, I had a whole new pair of arms to twist over at FEMA to make sure the construction contracts weren't subject to the unconscionable delays of competitive bidding.  But those were just someone else's shoes dropping in the autumnal breeze.  And some of my own were hitting the floorboards. ...

The Le Show link goes to HarryShearer.com, but it's easy to find your way to the Le Show archive with a few clicks.  It's worth it.

That Librul NPR

Just a few minutes ago on the horrible Day to Day, Maura Liasson provided some bonus cover for Dear Leader as she reminded us all that BushCo has always said that he would fire anyone convicted of a crime - not just indicted.   That, of course, is not true.

Bonus ignorance: An NPR reporter assigned to the CIA leak case and interviewed during  Liasson's spot didn't know that the Grand Jury could not be extended again and that a new one would have to be empaneled.  Apparently Liasson didn't know enough to correct him.  The host had already admitted to being "confused about Karl Rove." 

Honestly, I feel terrible for the people stuck with journamalists and unable to get their news and analysis from reliable sources.

Congress Cuts Block Grant Program

It's late and I'm exhausted. Listen to NPR's story about the House's 50% cuts to community service block grants. Tom Harkin has some good quotes.