June 2nd, 2009
Love how the snark oozes just a hair below the surface:
(CNN) — It appears President Obama has to step up his reading pace if he wants to beat his predecessor in one particular measure: how many books a president can polish off a year.
In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, Obama said he is currently reading Joseph O’Neill’s 270-page novel “Netherland,” a book Obama first said he began back in April.
If Obama is close to finishing the novel, that puts him on less than a 10 book-a-year pace, far less than the close to 100 books President Bush was reportedly able to finish in the same amount of time.
[...]
In 2006, Bush read 95 books to Roves 110: a Herculean pace of nearly two books a week — in an election year to boot — for the ex-president. But, according to Rove, Bush’s reading slowed a bit in the final years of his presidency, finishing a not-too-shabby 51 books in 2007 and at least 40 in 2008.
And if that’s not impressive enough, Rove also said Bush found time to read the Bible “from cover to cover” every year.
What can one say, except, Yeah, right!? One hundred books per year my [blip]!
I wish he had read the August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief: Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.
April 13th, 2009
On Point with Tom Ashbrook did a segment on conservative hate speech being spewed by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, right-wing talk radio and their counterparts on Fox News. Here’s how the program is teased:
[T]he language lately on air has grown particularly fierce and apocalyptic: President Obama called a dictator and sympathizer with terrorists. His policies called socialist, Marxist, Bolshevik, dangerous. Americans called to rise up in revolt. All this while the economy tanks and gun sales surge.
That last line is the operative and, frankly, scary one: while the economy tanks and gun sales surge. Let’s not forget that conservative right-wing blowhards animated, if not inspired, two recent terrorist incidents: 1. A gunman that opened fire at a church for its liberal views, 2. A second man in Pennsylvania ambushed police officers because, he thought, they and Obama were coming to take his guns away.
I wish Tom Ashbrook, the host of On Point, had been unabashedly critical of the vile rhetoric being spewed by conservatives on Fox News and talk radio; but, like a good “journalist,” Tom maintained his objectivity and largely agreed that liberals were guilty of similar offenses during the Bush years. To which I simply respond: bullshit! When was the last time any liberal went on TV or radio to call for armed revolution against the US government? Tom Ashbrook’s default fallback of journalistic objectivity is simply weak, and irresponsible in this instance.
February 16th, 2009
“Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Republican leaders in Congress are doing?”
51% disapprove
Pew Research Center Poll. Feb. 4-8, 2009.
N=1,303 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3
Josh Marshall, over at TalkingPointsMemo.com, captures something that I’ve given a couple of thoughts this past week. Understandably, if you watched the coverage over the stimulus bill you probably thought that president Obama was out of sync with Americans and that republicans, somehow, were now representative of public opinion. Of course, you would’ve been utterly and 110% wrong; however, according to the mainstream establishment media, especially cable news, republicans were gaining traction with their message of opposition against the stimulus bill and, thereby, against president Obama.
More importantly, however, than where the media thinks the momentum lies in the back-and-forth of a debate, the arguments or frames that the media decide to present to the public regarding policy do, in fact, influence public opinion. And, by this standard, the establishment media, given the last 25 years of conservative dominance of Washington, D.C., is simply predisposed hardwired to be more accommodating to the republican propaganda arm message machine. Washington, D.C., is a town that remains dominated by a conservative infrastructure composed of think thanks, media consultants, corporate lobbyists that are fundamentally attuned to the conservative ideology, and, therefore, composed of media producers with rolodexes filled with the numbers and contact information of conservative spokespersons ready to provide a quote, or to appear on-camera.
ThinkProgress.org ran the numbers and, as suspected, these illustrate that establishment media is dominated 2-to-1 by republican spokespersons, which is why consumers of establishment media may have thought that republicans were up and that president Obama was down in the court of public opinion:
As Media Matters has documented, during the Bush administration, the media consistently allowed conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives. The rationale was that Republicans were “in power.”
It appears that old habits die hard. Even though President Obama and his team are in control of the executive branch and Democrats are in the majority in Congress, the cable networks are still turning more often to Republicans and allowing them to set the agenda on major issues, most recently on the debate over the economic recovery package.
[...]
In total, from 6 AM on Monday to 4 PM on Wednesday, the networks have hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 26 times. Surprisingly, Fox News came the closest to offering balance, hosting 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. CNN had only two Democrats compared to 7 Republicans.
As Josh Marshall points out, there seems to be a big disconnect between the establishment media in Washington, D.C., and the rest of America:
“It’s eerie — I read the news from the Beltway, and there’s this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me.”
That’s from Ann Selzer, the Iowa pollster who’s an expert on public opinion throughout the midwest, as quoted by Ben Smith.
It really is the big story of the first weeks of the Obama administration. In Washington, it was a battle royale between the new president and an emboldened Republican minority. At times they seemed to have him on the ropes. And yet in the country at large, Obama remains super popular. And the GOP is wildly unpopular.
[...]
The city remains wired for the GOP. Not that it’s done them a great deal of good of late. But it remains a key part of understanding every part of what is happening today.
If the dynamic described above is true, and I believe that it is, it may take a while before the mainstream establishment media starts reflecting the shift in the balance of power that has come about in the country, given how unlikely it is that news producers and editors will empty out their trusty rolodexes.
