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 …

On Saturday 95,000 of my closest friends and I poured into the Big House at the University of Michigan to see my nephew Chris graduate from college. It was gratifying to see such a nice turnout for him. Of course it is possible the enormous crowd also came to see the other grads and the commencement speaker. He was a man named Barack O-something and boy, what a speech he gave.
Lost amidst the appropriately non-stop coverage of the failed car-bombing in Times Square, the predictably masturbatory coverage of the White …

As health care reform becomes law and we either A) become a socialist nation on the brink of collapse, or B) like every other first and second-rate country in the world and have something approximating universal health insurance, it’s time to ask a really frank and important question.
Are Americans too uninformed to be part of the process? OK that’s a little over the top but after the last year it’s really difficult for someone who’s spent a career trying to find the facts and then report them to watch the …

It’s almost too easy to take apart “reporters” and “newspapers” that claim to be practicing journalism. But when they go after actual journalists doing actual journalism it’s worth a note.
Tuesday’s review of Diane Sawyer’s debut in Tuesday’s NY Post is a case in point. Kyle Smith goes on a spleen dump and gets almost everything comically wrong. He’s one the the paper’s TV writers but you wouldn’t know it from his lack of knowledge, writing ability, or research acumen.
First let me say for the record that I don’t have strong …

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 …

Barack Obama may be, above all else, a savvier politician than even Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Why? With his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court Obama has set a defining trap for Republicans: If they take the bait they will dig themselves deeper into the pit of electoral despair that will take a generation to climb out of.
There are two fundamental things to remember about America and voting: Women vote in bigger percentages than men (plus there are more of them to begin with) and Hispanics are …

 
It’s a recurring theme of Get Real but only because Republicans keep doing things that prove the point. The Pity Party seems absolutely bent on self-destruction by following all the old rules for the old game that they can’t stop playing.
 
Take John Boehner, leader of the House Republican minority. Sunday George Stephanopoulos had him on to talk about the Republican alternatives to Barack Obama’s proposals including on global warming:
…the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we …

I know you’re all waking up this morning talking about the stimulus football but I can’t let pass what happened earlier on Sunday without notice.
The US government is about to spend 800 billion or 900 billion or a trillion dollars on a stimulus “program” and that was, rightly, the topic of every one of the major Sunday political television talk shows. Shows that are the closest thing America still has to relatively thorough discussions of critically important issues. Ha!
This week ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC showed just what they …

This Sunday morning’s chatterfest was filled with deep and informed discussions about the relative merits of cutting taxes versus spending tax money as a way to get the economy on track.
OK I’m lying. From one gasbag to the next politicians and their economic enablers were allowed to make rather grand statements without worry of being confronted with any facts about what history has shown to be most effective.
On Fox News Sunday Senator John McCain said, “We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that …

So usually we bestow a Mea Culpa on someone who admits he or she screwed up. U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts definitely screwed up in his first Presidential swearing-in reading the words of the oath wrong and making Barack Obama look screwy as well. Roberts didn’t exactly hold a press conference to talk about it — and frankly it was no big deal.
But kudos to Roberts for insisting on doing the swearing in again just to be sure and, according to some reports, to quash any right-wing conspiracy nuts …