While I’m an equal opportunity critic of cable “news” I can’t pass up this opportunity to share a clip that offers compelling evidence that Fox is, at times, in the business of completely and utterly lying for the sake of pushing a partisan agenda. Journalism by any standard other than that of Chairman Mao, Josef Stalin, or Big Brother is simply not practiced much of the time at Fox “News”. As I wrote last week, the Not-at-Ground-Zero-not-a-Mosque pseudo controversy  is yet another case of cable “news” and its taboid breathren …

First off sorry about the verrrrry long lapse in postings. As I recently explained to a follower of Get Real, the whole point of this blog was not just to spout off but to bring facts to bear on the issues and arguments we often are drowning in. That means it can take a few hours to write each post and frankly, I haven’t had the time lately. I gotta make a living and running a media production company is more than a full-time job. (Obvious plug opportunity: Please visit …

The one thing supporters and opponents of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court should agree on is this: it’s about time we had some non-judges on the high court…again.
The history of the Supreme Court is one filled with brilliant (and some not-so-brilliant) members who had never been judges before being confirmed. That was once considered not only normal, but a good thing. The non-judges have been some of the most remarkable names in the Court’s long history: Marshall, Brandeis, Frankfurter, Rehnquist, Warren. Thirty-seven other justices were part of the …

In all the coverage about Comcast’s purchase of NBC there’s been tons of talk about how NBC Universal has done very badly in the traditional broadcast television world but succeeded handily in cable. True enough if your horizon stretches no further than, say, next summer.
The obits for broadcast have been written before and with $600 billion in ad revenues sloshing around I’d bet the reports of broadcast television’s death are still very premature. But there’s no denying cable networks have a better economic model — at this moment.
The potentially fatal …

You didn’t even need to pick up a copy of the New York Post this morning to know the paper’s oh-so-predictable verdict on President Obama’s speech at West Point. In fact you didn’t even have to watch the paper’s stable mates at Fox last night to know what was coming. Because it’s been coming for months. For his legion of well-heeled and widely-distributed critics, the bottom line is simply, if it’s coming out of Obama’s mouth or Obama’s White House it is, by definition, bad, misguided, and probably un-American. Their …

So the cat is out of the bag and now the even the White House is worried about New York Governor David Paterson’s incredible deflating poll problem. But the way it’s playing out is not how the President, nor the people who put him up to this, expected.
Back up to this past winter when Paterson’s amateur-hour handling of his pick to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate left just about everyone slack-jawed. He managed to piss of anyone connected to the Kennedys (not an insignificant body of people especially in …

It was inescapable from the very start of Barack Obama’s campaign waaaaay back in January 2007 that race and racism would play a big part in whatever came to pass. And of course it did and it has and it still is and it always will. Now the New York Times — or to be fair one of her columnists — has finally said what is pretty apparent: An awful lot of the screaming incoherent rage ostensibly directed at Obama’s actions is actually just plain racism.
Maureen Dowd put it this …

OK so if the pundits left, right, and center are to be believed Barack Obama’s 7-month-old Presidency is in trouble and his speech to Congress on health care was his last best chance to keep the ship afloat. We’ll let you decide if that’s a bit hyperbolic (see: Bill Clinton health care failure 1994, reelection 1996 or George W. Bush “Education President” 2001, Iraq War legacy-killer 2008).
The big speech on the hill is getting plenty of (digital) ink but it was not Obama’s most important speech on Wednesday. That came …

It’s nothing new. Humans seem to prefer faith to facts. And I’m not talking about religion.
Howard Kurtz got lots of (liberal) blog links early this week with an article about the health care “debate” and how facts have been relegated to the sidelines. Kurtz now reports that it was Monday’s most commented piece on the paper’s website as people poured forth their vitriol from both sides of the health care aisle.
Kurtz’s main point was pretty simple: Despite the fact that many reporters demonstrably proved that the death panels myth was …

If  Barack Obama has an Achille’s Heel (if? who doesn’t…) it is almost certainly his arrogance. Most of the time he keeps it in check, or at least does a reasonably good job of masking it. When it peeks through he is generally quick to recognize the potential damage (“You’re nice enough, Hillary”). But this time his arrogance may once again cost Americans the chance at having the health care system as good as every other industrialized country in the world.
The arguments about the relative merits of various plans, the …