My Sensitive Side
Two of Keith and Watts!:
1. I Capture the Castle
2. Romeo + Juliet
3. Sabrina
4. Some Kind of Wonderful
5. Some Kind of Wonderful
6. The Painted Veil
7. Emma
8. Never Been Kissed
9. The Boy Who Could Fly
10. Rebel Without A Cause
11. Garden State
12. A Little Romance
13. The Notebook
14. Say Anything
15. Valley Girl
16. West Side Story
17. Get Over It
Richard Cohen, Still Defending Jim Cramer…
When I see columns like this gem from Richard Cohen, it reminds me of Orwell’s view of the internal dynamics of Great Britain. Whatever else you can about the Villagers, they’re a family. Dysfunctional, yes – abusive, yes – but still a family, and like any family, they close ranks when an enemy approaches:
But the role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at. The financial instruments that Wall Street firms were both peddling and buying are the functional equivalent of particle physics. To this day, no one knows their true worth.
It does not take cable TV to make a bubble. CNBC played no role in the Tulip Bubble that peaked, as I recall, in 1637, or in the Great Depression of 1929-41. It is the zeitgeist that does this — the psychological version of inertia: the belief that what’s happening will continue to happen.
It’s probably time we all got over the Stewart-Cramer showdown, if only because the whole incident has made something very clear: The Village journalistic establishment is determined not to learn its lesson. It is determined, in fact, not to hear any of the criticisms that were levelled at it. That’s why Cohen is trotting out precisely the same arguments that Cramer tried to use to defend himself during the interview: There wasn’t anything I could do, I don’t have subpoena power, even the bigshots didn’t know the whole thing was about to collapse, etc.
Cohen thinks he really has something with that last point. He writes up a short list of former investment bankers who lost billions of their own money in CDOs and credit swaps, and reasons that if they had known what was coming, they would have sold everything right away. That’s true, but it’s irrelevant. The criticism of the business media that Stewart was making – and that many others have tried to make before and since – wasn’t that Cramer, CNBC and its counterparts knew that a crash was coming and didn’t report it. The criticism is that they knew that Wall Street was peddling these credit derivatives, that they were immensely complicated and nobody quite understood them, and bought into the same money-gushing euphoria that the bankers and insurers did.
And actually, that’s exactly what Cohen is saying – how were we to know that all this paper was worthless if the bigshots doing the trading didn’t know? That is always the excuse. How were we to know that the anthrax that showed up in mailboxes all over the country in the wake of 9/11 wasn’t coming from Saddam Hussein, if that’s what Bush & Co. thought? How were we to know that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to the United States, if that’s what the administration believed?
That’s what makes this so fascinating as an artifact of Villager thinking. Cohen has – without intending to – identified the prime malaise of the journalistic establishment: The abandonment of skepticism, the unquestioning embrace of the worldview to which the political and business elites of this country subscribe. For the life of them, they can’t seem to understand that with it comes an abdication of whatever claim to moral and social authority they may have.
Jeeeeezus
Via Matt Yglesias, I bring you the Chairman of the Republican National Committee:
We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my fingers as quotation marks, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? Not very long.
The conservative answer to the famous “How Long? Not Long!” speech is a few decades late.
In any case, it’s encouraging to know that the putative leader of the Republican Party is taking his climate science cues from such classic films as D2: The Mighty Ducks:
[Bombay is eating ice cream with the Iceland trainer]
Coach Bombay: I thought Iceland was covered with ice.
María: No, it’s very green!
Coach Bombay: I thought GREENLAND was green!
María: Greenland is covered with ice, and Iceland is very nice!
AIDS in DC
Ta-Nehisi Coates points to this story in today’s Washington Post:
At least 3 percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that far surpasses the 1 percent threshold that constitutes a “generalized and severe” epidemic, according to a report scheduled to be released by health officials tomorrow.
That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 — or 15,120 — according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District’s HIV/AIDS office.
“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work in Zimbabwe. “They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”
“We have every mode of transmission” — men having sex with men, heterosexual and injected drug use — “going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them,” Hader said.
Obama and Cuomo Declare War on AIG
President Obama, apparently as disgusted as the rest of us:
“In the last six months, A.I.G. has received substantial sums from the U.S. Treasury,” Mr. Obama said. He added that he had asked Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner “to use that leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”
In strongly-worded remarks delivered in the White House East Room before small business owners, Mr. Obama called A.I.G. “a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed.”
“Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses at all, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Mr. Obama said. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?”
White House officials said that the administration is not looking to take A.I.G. to court to stop the company from paying out the bonuses. But they said the Treasury Department would be trying to figure out what they can do to block A.I.G. from making the payments within the legal confines of A.I.G.’s contractual obligations to the executives.
“All across the country, there are people who work hard and meet their responsibilities every day, without the benefit of government bailouts or multimillion-dollar bonuses,” said Mr. Obama, who called the issue one of “fundamental values.”
“All they ask is that everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington, play by the same rules,” he said.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, picking up Eliot Spitzer’s old niche as populist crusader against Wall Street largesse, has threatened to serve AIG with subpoenas if the company doesn’t send over a “list of employees who will receive these bonuses, as well as their job information and performances” by the end of the day.
As outrageous as these repeated bailouts have been, it’s nice to see rhetoric like Obama’s flowing from the East Room of the White House. To Go John Galt Karl Marx for a moment, crises like the debt derivative catastrophe we find ourselves in now “highten the contradictions” – they lay bare the competing interests of disparate social cliques, call into clear relief the prevailing socioeconomic structure of the society at large, and show us whose side everyone is really on. All of these things fuel a popular rage that compels us to question the fundamental legitimacy of the current order. For the last 30 years we could rely on the federal government – and the occupants of the Oval Office especially – to pretend to be above that fray, even as they quietly took the money and did the bidding of the people we now refer to as the Masters of the Universe. Obama’s remarks – “all they ask is that everyone play by the same rules” – at least indicates a recognition among mainstream politicians that, down here, we’re starting to wonder if “Change” is really all the change we need.
In the Aftermath of Stewart-Cramer…
…John King sits across the table from Dick Cheney, War Criminal, and asks him if he thinks Barack Obama is trying to deceive the American people.
This, while holding up tagboard photo of the front page of Human Events.
Your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen.
AIG: Livin’ la Vida Loca!
In case you didn’t see this coming from a mile away, our friends at the American International Group, recipient of $170 billion in federal bailout money, will be dispensing $165 million in cash bonuses to the top dogs of the company’s financial products division. Let me make that clear. We have all learned that AIG is actually two companies – one very profitable and very well-managed consumer insurance agency, and one godless financial speculation outfit run by coke-addled lunatics. We’re not talking about the former here. The coke-addled lunatics are getting $165 million in bonuses because, as the acting chairman of AIG’s board explained to a reportedly extremely pissed off Timothy Geithner, the company is contractually obligated to dispense them. [cough.] Sorry.
Two things. First, what the hell kind of contract guarantees bonuses of the size these people are bound to get when they’re hundreds of billions of dollars in the red and the federal government holds an 80 percent stake in the company? Second, I’m no lawyer, I don’t see what’s stopping Congress and the administration (as a legal matter, anyway) from doing what one of Matt Yglesias’s commenters suggests and retroactively legislating the relevant clauses of those contracts out of existence. It would only (!) save $165 million, but damn, it would feel really, really good.
UPDATE: Did I say $165 million? Because it seems I actually meant $450 million.
Blaming Bush
Remarking on the insane WaPo article we discussed earlier, Dean Baker posts an interesting chart…
If You Haven’t Spotted the Sucker in the First Half Hour, You’re the Sucker
Digby, as usual, gets this exactly right:
[Jim Cramer] thought he would get one of those friendly interviews that John McCain usually gets. After all, Stewart skewers politicians but treats them rather gently when he interviews them, right? But that’s a common misreading of Stewart. He skewers a lot of different things, including politics and culture, but his primary object of derision and satire is the media and particularly the lying gasbags who populate the cable shows. It’s the whole premise of his show.
For some reason the political media establishment just don’t get this. Recall the bizarrely confused reaction from the villagers at that notorious Colbert White House correspondents dinner appearance. They honestly didn’t understand that Stewart and Colbert have nothing but contempt for them.
I remember back in 2006 the network pundits were falling over themselves to broadcast clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report – Joe Scarborough (who’s now taken on his alter ego persona Doucheborough) made nightly habit of it. They never got the joke. The sets of both shows are set up to mock the talking head format. Stewart and Colbert have always, always been clear on this: Politicians will do what they do, respond to the incentives they’re presented with and take advantage of whatever opportunities the world presents them with. They hardly pretend to do otherwise. The political news media, on the other hand, sells itself as – and seems to genuinely believe it is – the guard dog of the people against the powerful, even as they plunge headlong into the insider game of cozying up to the political leadership, becoming the courtiers of the powerful instead of the mythical “Fourth Estate.”
Seriously. These people have an allergy to self-awareness.
The Annals of Shocked, Shockedness
The Washington Post would prefer to forget the years between January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009, but that damn Barack Obama just won’t let it go:
Obama’s more frequent and acid reminders that former president George W. Bush left behind a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a 14-month recession and a broken financial system have come at the same time Republicans have ramped up criticism that the current president’s policies are compounding the nation’s economic problems.
Obama had initially been content to leave partisan defense strategy to his proxies, but as the fiscal picture has continued to darken, he has appeared more willing to risk his image as a politician who is above petty partisanship to personally remind the public of Bush’s legacy.
You owe it to yourself to read Scott Wilson’s exercise in selective obliviousness yourself, because the entire piece is eminently snarkable blockquotable. The national news media is a narrative-seeking creature; I understand that. The trouble here is that the narrative we’re supposed to accept bears virtually no connection to reality, and not only that, it bears virtually no connection to the reality that this front page article actually mentions in passing.
The president did not receive a single House Republican vote for his stimulus plan, prompting some in his administration to view his bipartisan outreach efforts as having little hope of success.
It’s schizophrenic. The facts that Wilson establishes within the confines of this piece are these: Obama makes inaugural pledge to “end recriminations” and reach out to Republicans, the congressional Republican caucus ignores his overtures and delivers exactly three votes to the administration’s stimulus plan (despite the fact, according to Arlen Specter, that a significantly higher number secretly want it to pass), proceed to step up their criticism of his economic program, and Obama responds by reminding people that the Bush gang spent eight years digging the hole we now find ourselves in. And the narrative Wilson is trying to build on these facts? Obama is poisoning the air with partisanship. Bizarre. Who can be fooled by this?
Only Village journalists can be this credulous, because only Village journalists – always determined to remain in awe of the vaunted “toughness” and “discipline” of the Republican machine, even when that machine is flailing from leader to leader and its towering intellectual giant is toying with the idea of paying teen girls not to get pregnant – can buy the notion that Bipartisan is only Bipartisan when the Democrats chip away at their own agenda until the Republicans get their way, and that Tough-and-Principled is only Tough-and-Principled when a barely-relevant Republican minority cynically obstructs a popular Democratic president.
And the disastrous part is that this narrative – Republicans as Steadfast Manly Men – has become self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. Based on this Wilson’s article, you would never know that the Senate Democratic caucus is two (soon to be one) vote short of a cloture-sealing majority, that congressional Republicans have a 71 percent “unfavorable” rating, and that the entire conservative movement is crumbling before our eyes. Instead, the pressure is applied to the Notoriously Inept and Disorganized Democrats – who, it must be said, sabotage themselves by cowering beneath headlines like this – until they cave, the narrative is illustrated for all to see, and the process starts all over again. It’s what Matt Taibbi calls the “reality-making business” – it bears no relationship to actual reality.
These Paragraphs Don’t Work Together
The Daily’s editorial staff laments the end of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Although The Times cannot replace the P-I, readers should still support it as a news outlet because awareness about our surroundings is important, especially during this unstable time.
As readers, we must step up to the role of completing checks and balances in our society and not become lapdogs that don’t keep the media accountable. We need to remember that the world of print journalism is forever changing and evolving.
This is not so much grief at the prospect of the end of a newspaper as grief at the sudden constriction of post-graduation job opportunities for the authors of this weepy, subnormal prose. I plan on holding the Times accountable by not buying it until it produces content that enhances my “awareness about our surroundings.”
The “world of print journalism is forever changing and evolving” in that it’s going extinct. Fully nine percent of the citizenry of this country have “a great deal of confidence” in the media, down from 29 percent in 1978 – apparently, the only people that think this is sad are professional reporters, their immediate families, and the college journalism students that wanted their jobs.
