Category: Business

Tonight’s Bill Maher was the most unbelievably bad episode of an intolerably formulaic program. BuzzMachine has a transcript of the segment with pseudo Indian Ward Churchill that was the most glaring example of leading the witness I’ve ever seen. Maher is still playing the victim over his firing from ABC when his show ceased to be amusing, and he tried to rope Churchill into his cause. But all it did was illustrate that people involved in controversy over idiotic ass-kissing generally deserve what they get.

In Churchill’s case it’s not at all important what he said about the people in the WTC getting what was coming to them – he’s too inarticulate and plain stupid to hold any job at a university above shelving books, and even that’s a stretch.

We’re becoming a nation of morons.

A recent episode of The West Wing featured a character named Larry Lessig as a law professor who’d written a book called The Future of Ideas. This Lessig was advising Belarus on constitutional principles and the White House Spin Doctor was upset about the role of presidential power in the US constitution. The character was loosely based on reality, according to Lawrence Lessig of Blogistan:

The story is based (loosely) upon a true story. I was involved in the drafting of one early version of the Georgian constitution. But the story ended up in the West Wing because I told the story to my students in Constitutional Law at Harvard, and a current writer for the West Wing was in that class.

Well, I dunno about all this. The Future of Ideas is one of the corniest books ever written, and The West Wing is one of the corniest teevee shows, so it stands to reason they’d get together at some point. I figured the connection would be through the corniest man in Hollywood, Mr. Sterling creator Larry O’Donnell, so I’m actually surprised it was some guy named Josh Singer.

Technically, the Larry Lessig on TWW was fictional because the real Lessig didn’t actually have diddly to do with the Belarus constitution, but who’s quibbling?

I used to think Future of Ideas was the worst book ever written about the Internet, but Hugh Hewitt’s Blog tops it by a considerable distance. How fleeting is fame indeed.

One of these days I’m going to review Blog like I did FOI, only more so.

Jeff Jarvis’ exercise in peace-making with the Times seems to be bearing fruit. Is this a testament to Jeff’s mediating skill or to Keller’s realizing it’s not smart to pick fights with people who buy pixels by the trainload?

Some of the former, clearly, but more of the latter would be my guess.

After the Eason Jordan purge, LA Times bureaucrat David Shaw fears bloggers are after his scalp:

…bloggers appear to have achieved almost mythical power these days.

Bloggers can be useful. They did a good job, for example, in bringing the Rather/CBS screw-up to public attention. But some bloggers are just self-important ranters who seem to wake up every morning convinced that the entire Free World awaits their opinions on any subject that’s popped into their heads since their last fevered post.

Unfortunately, when these bloggers rise up in arms, grown men weep — and news executives cave in. That’s much more alarming than anything Jordan said.

Yes, it’s alarming that the MSM can’t get away with its traditional shenanigans any more, but I’m sure they’ll invent some new ones. Currently, it seems they’re having a hard time getting the script right about bloggers — a couple of months ago, we were a few nuts in pajamas, and now we’re still overheated ranters, but nevertheless a threat to the free press. That’s a pretty major promotion, isn’t it?

The controversy our leftist colleagues have been trying to stir up over Brit Hume’s use of some remarks made by FDR on social security is pretty pathetic. The charge, in case you live under a rock and don’t get exposed to this sort of nonsense, is that Hume distorted FDR’s letter to Congress on social security by selective quotation. Unfortunately (and quite predictably), those making the charge actually distorted Hume’s remarks by selective quotation.

Here’s the part of Hume’s story that you won’t see on Media Matters, Oliver Willis, Al Franken, Paul Krugman, or any of the other hate sites, courtesy of Villainous Company. Hume began the story by putting FDR’s quote into this this context:

Senate Democrats gathered at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial today to invoke the image of FDR in calling on President Bush to remove private accounts from his Social Security proposal. But it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it.

The scurrilous ones in question have claimed that Hume said FDR planned to replace social security with private investment. Here’s David Brock’s spin on Media Matters:

In an attempt to promote President Bush’s plan to partially privatize Social Security, nationally syndicated radio host and former Reagan administration official William J. Bennett and FOX News managing editor and anchor Brit Hume falsely claimed that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated replacing Social Security with private accounts.

and here’s Al Franken’s bit on his blog:

Hume?s claim is that FDR wanted to replace Social Security with private accounts. Hume is lying.

Brock and Franken are clearly lying, substituting Hume’s accurate quote on supplementing mandatory social security taxes with voluntary contributions to a personal annuity with a fabrication about the wholesale replacement of social security as we know it.

The lying seems to me especially damning given that Franken and Brock stake close to 100% of their claim to relevance on their alleged respect for facts and contempt for lying on the other side.

I’m not saying Franken should resign from Air America, because I think his style of deception is uniquely suited for it, just that nobody should take him seriously because he’s, well, a big fat lying liar. And David Brock’s a serial slanderer who works for the highest bidder, a man without principle, and he may as well work for Soros (as he does now) as for Scaife (as he used to do.)

Wonderful company they have on the left these days.

UPDATE: There is an argument to be made that Hume misstated the intent of the FDR letter by muddling private accounts with voluntary annuities drawn from a common fund, and we could well argue whether that’s significant. But Franken and Brock didn’t make that argument, preferring to simply twist Hume’s statement from its clear meaning about a supplementary system to a replacement of the mandatory system. So even if you believe that Hume “lied” by comparing two similar but not identical plans, Franken and Brock’s lies are more egregious by an order of magnitude because they equated two dissimilar things.

So it’s curtains for Saddam-spinner Eason Jordan:

SAN FRANCISCO (AFX) — CNN’s top news executive, Eason Jordan, said Friday he’s resigning amid controversy over his assertion that journalists were targeted and killed by coaltion forces in Iraq. ‘After 23 years at CNN, I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq,’ he said in a note to CNN staff.

With Jeff Gannon a goner too, it’s Blogs 2, Scumbags 0. Not a bad week. Now let’s build on this triumph by helping Howie Kurtz out the door.

H/T Mickey Kaus and Jefe Jarvis.

UPDATE: See Rony Abovitz’ blog for comments from the guy who broke the story from Davos, and Michelle Malkin for the timeline.

The anti-war, anti-Bush, left-wing blogosphere is all atwitter over some guy named Jeff Gannon (or maybe not) who used to cover the White House for the Talon News web site. The objection goes something like this (from Daily Kos):

Gannon/Guckert’s problem wasn’t that he was a conservative, it’s that he used an alias to obtain a press pass for a fake news organization that served as a surrogate for a Republican political operation.

Wow, that sounds pretty horrible, doesn’t it? I’d have to say that any partisan hack who misrepresents himself in order to get a press pass has no credibility and no honor. Who would do such a thing? Daily Kos’s founder, Markos Zuniga for one.

Down with all who do this, of course. And for some reason, the lefties think it’s really important that this guy is gay. Why, I can’t fathom, but they make a point of it most every time he’s mentioned. OK, he’s gay, he’s conservative, and he acts like Kos. So what?

UPDATE: Here’s some more of Kos’ hypocritical droolings about his right-wing mirror image:

So, um, our guy was a treasonous fake reporter who helped expose an undercover CIA agent while getting White House press credentials with a fake name to lob softballs at Bush and McClellan, registered website names dealing with gay prostitution while writing stories advancing the Right’s anti-gay agenda, and when he cowardly quit, purged all his stories from the sites in which they lived.

So the charges are:

1. Exposed undercover agent (false, Plame wasn’t undercover and we don’t know who exposed her).
2. Got press credentials to play partisan politics (true, same as Kos).
3. Gay (true, so what?)
4. Quit when exposed (true, so what?)

So I make that 2 “so what’s”, one “same as Kos”, and one “false charge”. And why was this supposed to be a story again?

When Eason Jordan said he covered-up for Saddam in order to keep the CNN Baghdad bureau open, people gave him the benefit of the doubt, but now that he’s claiming the US military has executed a dozen journalists, or maybe not, it appears he had altogether different motives. The man is obviously a slimeball, and CNN has to let him go.

Kaus, Reynolds, and Jarvis have got the story right, and Kurtz has disgraced himself.