His what now?

I love Frank Rich, but his latest essay hits the ground running with an absurd premise (which Rich borrows and amplifies):

It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

Huh?

Whatever you think of what Obama is doing to try to fix the economy, at least he is trying to fix the economy. (Wasn't the "big story" a few weeks back about how he suddenly has gray hair?) Maybe his solution is wrong, maybe he is being unduly political or cautious, maybe he's just trying to shore up things the way they were, maybe he's secretly in the pockets of the already-entrenched powers-that-be. Or maybe he isn't. But at least he is taking action. And at least he demonstrates a basic level of empathy and concern about the issue.

Bush's Katrina sins, lest we forget, were of a different stripe altogether. When the hurricane hit, Bush was oblivious, incompetent, and criminally cavalier, all at once. His "response" was inaction, and the impression he created was that he did not give a flying fuck. What emergency, remember?

Am I crazy to think there's a difference?

Your pork is my bacon

Got up this morning thinking that if I had to hear one more talking head spew sound-byte-y BS about the stimulus bill, I would simply have to tear my hair out. Or, uh... you know... gnash my teeth.

How grateful I was to discover Steven Pearlstein bringing some (sarcastic) clarity to this issue:

"This is not a stimulus plan, it's a spending plan," Nebraska's freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, "won't create the promised jobs. It won't activate our economy."

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus.

Right. The underlying point here is that "wasteful spending" is often code for "spending that immediately benefits someone else," or "spending that offends my ideology in some way." But c'mon: spending is spending. And it's always stimulative somehow.

Pearlstein goes on:

Meanwhile, Nebraska's other senator, Ben Nelson (D), was heading up a centrist group that was determined to cut $100 billion from the stimulus bill. Among his targets: $1.1 billion for health-care research into what is cost-effective and what is not. An aide explained that, in the senator's opinion, there is "some spending that was more stimulative than other kinds of spending."

Oh really? I'm sure they'd love to have a presentation on that at the next meeting of the American Economic Association. Maybe the senator could use that opportunity to explain why a dollar spent by the government, or government contractor, to hire doctors, statisticians and software programmers is less stimulative than a dollar spent on hiring civil engineers and bulldozer operators and guys waving orange flags to build highways, which is what the senator says he prefers.

Yes. These sorts of comparisons seem absurd to me.

And, in that vein, why are we supposed to assume that government jobs aren't really jobs? Par exemple:

Henninger weighed in with his own list of horror stories from the stimulus bill, including $325 million for trail repair and remediation of abandoned mines on federal lands, $6 billion to reduce the carbon footprint of federal buildings and -- get this! -- $462 million to equip, construct and repair labs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"What is most striking is how much 'stimulus' money is being spent on the government's own infrastructure," wrote Henninger. "This bill isn't economic stimulus. It's self-stimulus."

Actually, what's striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.

Anyway, now it appears we are on our way to a deal... we'll see what happens.

Sometimes you can see the steam coming out of his ears

Alright, here I go again.

Why do I get so mad at the TV people? And why in particular do I get maddest at the very TV people whose hearts I know are in the right place, and with whom I tend to agree, politically?

Cue Keith Olbermann's show last night, and his opening report, on the (apparently insane) governor of Illinois. There were two moments that irritated me about this thing. The first can be found at around 2:40 in the following vid:



To wit: Obama, in footage from an exchange with the press, responds to the Blagojevich nonsense, but declines to go into any detail. Olbermann (back in the studio, of course) interjects:

Olbermann outburst number 1: "Oh, no, not four more years of not commenting on ongoing investigations, not that crap, that's not change we can believe in. Surely there's something the president-elect could say about his involvement without compromising Mr. Fitzgerald's efforts."

[Cue to footage of Obama doing exactly that]

Olbermann outburst number 2: "Now, was that so hard?"

Let me get this straight. Olbermann, reading from a teleprompter, knew, before making outburst number 1, that outburst number 2 would be following a few seconds later?

He knew, in other words, that outburst number 2 effectively made outburst number 1 irrelevant? He knew, while he was insisting that Obama "say something about his own involvement without compromising Mr. Fitzgerald's efforts," that Obama had already said something about his own involvement without compromising Mr. Fitzgerald's efforts?

What the fuck?

Later, Olbermann interviewed Jonathan Alter:



And here we have irritating moment number 2: a glimpse of the sort of power trip that comes from manufacturing drama out of thin air. It starts when Olbermann pursues the Obama connection (or non-connection):

"Well, to that point, eleven minutes into a nightly news broadcast tonight was the headline 'Barack Obama's First Scandal,' and it was eleven minutes into one of the British news casts, ITV. As much of an oversimplification as it is, and as much as it's contradicted by what Blagojevich said on those tapes, is there a risk of the implication sticking to the president-elect that this is his first political scandal?"

Okay, I have to ask: when a broadcaster gets into "is there a risk of the implication sticking" territory, specifically concerning an implication that has not yet stuck, how exactly is that different from the classic politician's gambit of deftly raising questions about an opponent -- especially guilt-by-association type questions -- without ever coming out and accusing them of anything? Isn't it the same dynamic? Plant the seed, and then step aside while it grows (or dies) -- never thinking about or owning your own responsibility in the process?

If the "Obama involvement" angle was discredited from the get-go (and Fitzgerald himself insisted that it was), why even raise it here? Until and unless new, contradictory evidence emerges, I have to ask, again: what the fuck?

It's amazing to me how much of what passes for news these days is actually the anticipation of news. So much of what journalists (especially broadcast journalists) do is wrapped up in the pseudo-science of making predictions. In part, that's the ruthlessness of the media-industrial complex's bottom line: you have to have enough "stuff" to fill up the hour, and if you don't actually have all the data on a story by air time (but you know you're dealing with a big story), you want people to continue to believe that you are "the most trusted name in news" or whatever. So you have to convincingly extemporize your way through the subject. You want to appear authoritative, right? You don't want to appear to be as clueless as the people watching at home, do you?

(Incidentally, note to networks: my ability to trust you is inversely related to the number of times you tell me that you're trustworthy. If you have to tell me you're cutting through the bull, I'm sorry, but I'm going to think you're bullshitting me.)

At what point does this mania for prediction help to create the news? At what point is the media getting in the business of self-fulfilling prophecy? Not out of a vindictiveness toward any one politician or party, but just because it has become standard operating procedure?

Look: Obama should not be protected from media critique. (Duh! Of course.) But these broadcasters need to get a new game. Because four more years of this shit is not change I can believe in.