Steny Hoyer: Stephen Colbert's Testimony To Congress Was 'An Embarrassment For Mr. Colbert'

Actors performing in Congress... I remember when a young Kuwaiti refugee named Nariyah testified before both houses of Congress about babies being ripped from incubators and thrown on the floor by Saddam's soldiers. Of course it came out much later that that "refugee" was the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador who had lived most of her life in the DC area. She was never identified as such during her testimony. It also came out later that there was no evidence of babies ever having been ripped from incubators by Iraqi troops.

So we have one known actor appearing before congress in character telling the truthful story of his brief foray into farm work. And one undisclosed actor giving utterly fraudulent testimony before Congress. Lying to Congress is a crime; in that case unprosecuted. In one case a comedian brought a bit of poignant levity to a serious issue in a totally transparent way. In the other we had a Hill & Knowlton orchestrated PR stunt that paved the way to an actual war.
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Rep. Ellison: 'Gibbs Crossed The Line'

This was just dumb; alienating the liberal base months before an election. This is where Republicans beat us coming and going. They court their lunatic fringe. It keeps them in the fold, even when they don't get everything they want, and it keeps the Overton window moving farther and farther to the right. The "professional" Dems keep proving themselves to be idiots. They're still letting far right Republicans control the debate and control them.
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Colleges NOT Worth Their Tuition (PHOTOS)

Where did I get the crazy idea that college was supposed to be about learning? Clearly it's a simple business transaction.
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Gulf Oil Spill: BP Tries To Limit Release Of Oil Spill Research

"'That's not wrong. Those are the rules of the game,' he said. 'It's the survival of a company, the survival of a crucial industry is at stake in a vital market area. This is serious business.'"

Call me crazy. I'm a little more concerned about the survival of the planet, of the "crucial" ecosystem, of the "vital" human, animal, and plant lives. I'm eccentric like that.
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Ben Stein: Idiot

Any respect I ever had for Ben Stein has thoroughly evaporated. Book smarts aside, the man's an idiot. Anyone who's ever seen lay-offs in action, from investor pleasing dumbsizing to this catastrophic recession-led shredding, knows full well that it's almost completely impersonal. In many cases the decisions are made by people who've never even met the people they've slated for pink slips. So what fucking universe is Ben Stein living in when he says shit like this?

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along — not always easy.

Matt Taibbi on Journalism's Endangered Species

Matt Taibbi has picked up the torch of journalism so predictably dropped by Politico.

First of all, I want to congratulate Michael Hastings for the amazing job he did on the McChrystal piece. Not only was it a coup for our magazine, but it's a reminder of what journalists are supposed to be doing. For quite a long time political journalism, particularly in Washington, has been reduced to an access-trading game, where reporters are rewarded for favorable coverage of those in the know with more time and availability.

This symbiotic dynamic affects not just individual reporters but whole publications and news channels; it's a huge reason why reporters have in general resisted challenging political authorities. Nobody wants to be the guy who gets not only himself but his whole paper shut out of the access game. Since many recent politicians have made good on this implied threat (George Bush's shut-out of the Washington Post's White House reporters is a classic example), what we get is coverage that across the board fails to ask hard questions and in general treats leaders with a reverence they don't always deserve.

But his bête noire David Brooks reflexively bristles at the notion that reporters and sources shouldn't be chums.

In the column Brooks talks about how the media landscape has changed over the past 50 years, about the gotcha journalism culture in which a public official, sadly, no longer feels safe in having a beer with a reporter and bragging about his mistresses and his Swiss bank accounts. Once upon a time, Brooks says, pols and reporters did a lot of "kvetching" together, gossiping about events in and around the Hill – and most of that "kvetching" stayed out of print:

Those of us in the press corps have to figure out how to treat this torrent of private kvetching. During World War II and the years just after, a culture of reticence prevailed. The basic view was that human beings are sinful, flawed and fallen. What mattered most was whether people could overcome their flaws and do their duty as soldiers, politicians and public servants. Reporters suppressed private information and reported mostly — and maybe too gently — on public duties.

Ah, the halcyon days when reporters could be trusted to protect the elite...

But, as Taibbi also notes, CBS news's Afghanistan "reporter" Lara Logan may be even more callow than Brooks.

Lara Logan, come on down! You're the next guest on Hysterical Backstabbing Jealous Hackfest 2010!

I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Reliable Sources" program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an "unspoken agreement" that journalists are not supposed to "embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter."

Politico Almost Commits an Act of Journalism

The unvarnished look at General McChrystal that just tanked his career was made available by a freelance reporter who wasn't beholden to almighty "access." So said Politico before they sent that little revelation down the memory hole.

The Politico was so hopped up about the story that it took the extraordinary step of posting on its site a PDF of Rolling Stone’s article because Rolling Stone had not put it online fast enough. In one of the many articles The Politico ran about the episode the following observation was made by reporters Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee:

McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks. [emphasis mine]

. . .

Our reveal is looking pretty good, isn’t it? Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee let us in on a little trade secret. They have no motive to make it up. Lee is a beat reporter herself, qualified to speak on the subject. Lubold has covered the military for years. Politico trades in this kind of observation; it was founded to reveal some of journalism’s “state secrets.” Tom Ricks, a former beat reporter for the Washington Post who also covered the military, says pretty much the same thing: beat reporters have an investment in continuing the relationship so they are less risky for a powerful figure like McChrystal.

And then, the next day… the reveal disappears. The Politico erased it, as if the thing had never happened. Down the memory hole, like in Orwell’s 1984. The story as you encounter it online today doesn’t have that part (“would not risk burning bridges…”) in it. Clint Hendler of Columbia Journalism Review, who discovered the missing lines, asked The Politico about it…

Hendler got no answer. One wonders what access Politico is trying to preserve.

Olbermann Tells Obama: Reject McChrystal's Resignation Offer (VIDEO)

Olbermann may have a grasp of the politics around this but he doesn't understand military culture or the importance of the chain of command. This isn't about Obama as President and politician. McChrystal showed a total lack of respect to Obama as Commander in Chief of the Armed Services. He was waving his nutsack in Obama's face with this interview. If Obama doesn't cut him down to size he risks losing the respect of the entire military, too many of whom already see him as weak and ineffectual because he's a Democrat with no military background. Obama needs to make an example of this dickwad and he needs to show that he understands the UCMJ.
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What's Next? Stocks? Pillory? Scarlet Letter?

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I've been saying for years that they'd start throwing us debtors' prisons again. That joke just got a whole lot less funny.

Deborah Poplawski still gets angry about her arrest in Minneapolis last year over an old $250 debt. During her night in jail, she worried about abandoning her 15-year-old dog, Nina, in her apartment.

. . .

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

New York Officially Dead

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And here is the epitaph:

I am ending Lost City. Most of the City is lost after all—the good parts, anyway—so you could say the course of history has put me out of a job. Ironically, the kinds of news that fills up a jeremiad like this will, if too constant and voluminous, eventually puts the enterprise out of business. It's like writing a volcano report from Pompei; you know the communiques are going to end sometime.

I began the blog because I was incensed and alarmed at what the city was becoming. It was losing its grit, its fabric, its very character. It was losing its New York-ness, and gaining nothing but Subway franchises and luxury condos. Since none of my editors would let me write about it, I became my own editor. I was gratified to soon find that there were a lot of people out there who felt the way I did. And it wasn't too long before there were other bloggers who took on a similar mission, like Jeremiah Moss at Vanishing New York and EV Grieve at the blog of the same name. Taken together, we made for quite a few howls in the wilderness. And, tragically, we never ran out of things to report.

But, in the end, they were just howls, as ineffective at Lear's on the heath. I wrote thousands of words, and posted hundreds of pictures for four-and-a-half years—nearly 3,000 posts, all told. None of them made any difference. Not really. The press paid a little attention to our windmill-tilting, but City Hall never did. The City continued on its inexorable march to glossy mediocrity. Bloomberg, the billionaire, city planner Amanda Burden, the millionaire, and their cabal of equally wealthy real estate and Wall Street pals forged ahead and got the metropolis they wanted all along: homogenous, anodyne, whitewashed, suburban, toothless, chain-store-ridden, ordinary, exclusive and terribly, terribly expensive. A town for tourists and the upper 2%. He took a world-class capital of culture, individuality and independent endeavor and turned it into the smoothest, first-class, gated community Houston ever saw. Walk down Broadway on the Upper West Side, Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, Third Avenue in Yorkville—or look at the gaping hole of Altantic Yards—and you will see the administration's legacy.

My father, a nearly life-long New Yorker, warned me of its pending demise when I was just a kid. Why? The middle class increasingly forced out by ludicrous rent prices, small businesses forced out by ludicrous rent prices, everything good forced out by ludicrous rent prices... Well, let's face it, it's only gotten worse and more ludicrous. New York is a cautionary tale of what happens when an economy produces only rich and poor. And the darkness is spreading.