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 feelings about Diane Sawyer one way or another. It’s good that two of the three big seats of TV journalism are filled with women (finally) but I kinda prefer Katie. Nonetheless I don’t watch any of the nightly newscasts regularly (I’m decidedly under the age of 63) so I don’t particularly care.

Second, it pays to remember here that the Post and Fox News are Rupert Murdoch’s one-two partisan political punchers — media outlets that feed off of one another to help create news-like events that do the boss’s bidding (see: Tea Partys). Once you get that it makes all the sense in the world why Mr. Smith would go to Cuckooland in talking about FNC competitor ABC News.

Smith takes Sawyer to task for interviewing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week, holding the “get” until this week, and then not really grilling him. That’s all fair. TV news has always been about the “show” as much as the journalism and lining up big interviews so that the promotions department can tease the crap out of it is SOP on all the networks including Kyle’s beloved FNC. Remember Fox’s Sarah Palin week? A sharper bulb might have used ABC’s reliance on this old skool technique to point out how all the network news divisions have turned their nightly 22 minutes into shows about their anchors rather than about the news.

Instead Smith goes on to note that ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl did a piece on health care that was, according to Kyle, insufficiently like one Glenn Beck would do. He notes with derision that the story was filled with “last week’s” news about the deals made to get various Senators to back the bill. The same reports that fill his own paper’s coverage today. I’m pretty sure the intrepid Mr. Smith has not taken his complaints about the Post’s coverage to his boss Col Allen. Probably because the story is still developing….

Then there’s this:

A story on the dropping crime rate cited FBI statistics that showed, for instance, murder down 10 percent from January to June. Wait: you’re giving us news that became available July 1? Is this ABC or The History Channel?

Hahahaha. Oh that Kyle. So clever! But wait: it take the FBI six months to collect crime stats from the hundreds of cities and towns and law enforcement agencies across the country. So the FBI report was released…wait for it…yesterday. The day ABC (and everyone else including the NY Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, and 686 other news sites according to Google) reported on it. Apparently fact-checking is not a strong suit of either Mr. Smith or his paper. Maybe I can help. Here’s the press release from the FBI.

Smith digs Sawyer and her show as a “stale plate of info-leftovers for shut-ins, news for people who aren’t all that interested in news” without noting that the three network newscasts still get at least four times as many viewers as all of the prime-time cable clowns combined. I admit I’m not one of either group but if Smith’s colorful description of Sawyer’s show is accurate I can’t wait for him to let his quick wit loose on the shows of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann all of which traffic in talking about days-old stories (forget about reporting anything) to audiences that are even older (and presumably more shut in) than the network newscasts.

Finally Smith shows his true colors when he derisively points out that the Sawyer broadcast spent 27 seconds on the death of actress Brittany Murphy as compared with 42 seconds on Obama delivering cookies to kids. I’m not sure either deserved that much time but what do I know? Unlike Kyle Smith I don’t work for a “news”  organization that devoted more back-to-back covers to Tiger Woods sex life than it did to the September 11th attacks in which almost 3000 Americans died.

Joker or Whiteface?

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 way on Sunday:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

Nothing new here if you’re a regular follower of even the slightly-left-of-center blogosphere but for the Doyenne of the Paper of Record it’s a mighty leap.

It’s not a leap Obama nor his inner circle want to make, though, lest the President get drawn into the elemental American battle. It’s been raging for 300 hundred years — from the Founders through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board, OJ Simpson, to the first African-American president. America has never worked through it’s race-tainted birth and probably never will unless and until we’re all so intermixed that to be American means to be “Made of Many Parts.”

Obama has done his best to act as if we are post-racial but he, and everyone else, knows better. As a black man, though, he can’t actually engage in this battle directly without becoming exactly what his conservative critics so desire — another Jesse Jackson. Turning Obama into a black guy who happens to be President (as opposed to what he is: the President who happens to be a black guy) would be a major accomplishment for the Beck-Limbaugh Axis of Anger. And so they will continue to work very hard on that goal knowing they have fertile soil in which to till their seeds of rage.

In the meantime let’s face the facts: When a bunch of angry, white, post-65-year-old people scream and yell all summer about the government taking over health care, it cannot really be about the government taking over health care. Why? Because the screamers all have government health care. It’s called Medicare and every American over 65 gets it (not that Maria Bartiromo would know this). So when these folks rage with such force that they risk stroke and heart attack they do so knowing full well that should such a health calamity befall them, you and I  will pick up the tab for their hospitalization and care. Must be nice.

And when fringe groups organize Tea Parties to protest taxes and bailouts that then reappear months later as personal hate-fests aimed at one man, it is clearly not about taxes and bailouts which got relatively scant attention at Saturday’s big 9/12 rally in Washington. The rally, which was respectfully covered by the Washington Post and The Hill has become yet another paper tiger for conservatives like Matt Welch (of the conservative opinion mag Reason) writing in today’s New York Post:

How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you support? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday’s massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done.

“Small protest,” popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station.

Welch goes on to quote the head of a DC-based think tank and, of course, Dowd. When he frames the argument that way (using a liberal blogger, a think-tanker, and a liberal op-ed columnist as the only evidence of media bias) he’s able to make a convincing case that the protest had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the mainstream media keeping the facts from the American people. Well done sir!

Of course we can thank Representative Addison Graves Wilson Sr. (oh, sorry, that’s Joe to his constituents) of “You Lie!” fame for at least some of this belated recognition of racism as the root. The Republican Congressman from the great state of South Carolina was a folk hero at the march on Saturday for allegedly speaking truth to power. There were more than a few “Joe for President” signs. But as Dowd put it better than I can:

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.

Joe Wilson is a racist. And so are many of the people that have attended rallies and town halls who are incapable of explaining what it is they are opposed to other than “him”. “Socialism” doesn’t count — especially for Medicare recipients and anyone who lives in the West where life exists in most places only because the Federal government built dams to provide cheap water and cheap power. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbauch are racists of convenience: Spouting thinly-veiled racism earns them huge paychecks (Limbaugh = $38 million/year minimum, Beck = $18 million/year).

Case in point: Beck’s recent regurgitation of a video showing young black men in military camo pants and blue t-shirts doing some sort of drill. Watch it all here. Beck first spent a couple of weeks wondering what these young men were up to back in October (during the last month of the campaign natch) and never quite was able to discover (despite plenty of very quick posts to the web explaining what the video was) that it was a high-school drill team practice. If only they’d been dressed in leotards he would have understood! In fact Beck learned very quickly what the video was and he certainly knows now but he still uses it to conjure up the specter of a secret army of black men ready to help the black president get his way — and give us all health care….

And then there’s that Obama as The Joker poster. Is it an affirmative action success story that a black man is playing the Joker? Or is it a not-very-subtle racist reminder of the not-so-distant past? We report, you decide.

Everyone knows there’s deep-seated racism in America and it’s not just among white people. Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Caribbean-Americans, Indians. There’s racism in every group and in every one of us. Sometimes there’s a lot,  sometimes very little. And that’s what Obama tried to be open about in his groundbreaking speech on race during the campaign. His grandma was a little bit racist and so is he. His point was that racism is alive and well and will never go away unless we acknowledge it, talk about it, and keep it uncovered.

Unfortunately some people have taken that to mean wearing racism on one’s sleeve is a good thing.

Starr writes about the long slow decline in Oprah’s ratings for her afternoon syndicated talk show. He notes early on that the show’s numbers are “down by nearly a third, 32 percent, records show” before jumping into the speculation pool for a quick dip of “Why?”

One source suggested she has too many projects and isn’t giving enough of her attention to the show any more. Then Starr hops into the deep end:

Others have speculated that Oprah is seeing an “Obama Backlash” — a reaction against her public endorsement of Barack Obama’s presidential run and her active campaigning for him. It’s not necessarily that people were against Obama, the theory goes. They just did not like the talk-show host taking sides in a political campaign — something she’d never done before. It took away the feeling fans had that somehow Oprah was above the fray.

Hmmm. What a great theory. Except for the part about her ratings dropping for each of the last five years. Oh, yeah, that. Ratings are down 21% for TV’s biggest hit, American Idol since 2006. I’m sure Obama has something to do with that too.

Not that the Post writes about ratings like an industry trade nor should it be expected too but isn’t the more interesting story about Oprah is that even she is not immune to the reality that broadcast television is dying almost as fast as newspapers. Ratings for broadcast television — network, local, and syndicated — have collapsed and with the recession ad revenue has followed. Plenty of people in the industry are talking not about a rebound but a reinvention. Without it broadcast television as a dominant or even significant media force in America will end.

The real deal on Oprah is this: It costs local stations vast sums of money to buy Oprah each week and for years it’s been worth it. Oprah rocked the ratings and delivered those viewers to stations’ local newscasts where they recouped the investment. Not any more. Local news ratings in the 4pm and 5pm time slots have plummeted across the country (so badly at the flagship station for fourth-place NBC that WNBC will kill off the famed “Live at Five” newscast in September and fill the hour with super cheap lifestyle programming) leaving station managers desperate to cut costs.

Oprah’s syndication deal only runs through the 2011 season and she is launching her own cable network next year. The economics — both for local stations and Oprah — dictate that she leave broadcast television in much the way pro sports (other than football) have done.

So when the Post headlines “Game O-ver?” the paper isn’t wrong. It’s just the headline shouldn’t be about Oprah, it should be about broadcast television.

Bill O'Reilly

OK so it’s not the most surprising headline and many people probably believe it could be a daily column but this is a special episode of “Bill O’Reilly is Allergic to Facts.” Today’s episode: Newspaper circulation.

O’Reilly’s syndicated column is essentially a hearty har-har-har over the troubles at the New York Times which is, of course, a favorite topic among the legions of Americans who hate the “paper of record.” There’s certainly plenty to write about on that score but Bill takes the super lazy way out insists the paper’s problems are because it’s “the nation’s largest left-wing newspaper.”

The New York Times is most definitely a committed left-wing concern that is openly contemptuous of the conservative, traditional point-of-view. That is the primary reason the paper may soon dissolve.

O’Reilly supports his argument by noting that recent newspaper closings have all been at similarly “lefty” publications.

Over the past few months, newspapers in Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Denver have either folded or filed for bankruptcy. With the exception of The Rocky Mountain News, all the papers were committed left-wing enterprises. The truth is that most Americans are traditional-minded folks; they believe their country is noble, they want respectful discourse. Fanaticism of any kind is not the American way.

Neither is making sh*t up and that’s what BillO’s up to today. First off when did the Chicago Tribune become a “committed left-wing enterprise”? When they backed George W Bush over Al Gore in 2000 or when they backed George W Bush over John Kerry in 2004? Supporting Obama in 2008 was as much of a surprise as the fact that no major Texas newspaper failed to endorse their home-state guy in 2000.

Then, even if you accept that those other closed papers were super liberal, is that really the reason they folded? After all the survivors in Denver and Seattle are certainly no more conservative than their fallen brethren. The Denver Post endorsed Gore in 2000 while the Rocky Mountain News went with Bush. And both supported Bush over Kerry in 2004. Commies indeed!

The truth (Bill loves that word — too bad he doesn’t practice what he so pompously preaches) is that newspapers across the country are in dire straights and it has nothing to do with their editorial pages. Look at what’s happened to the circulation at the top 10 “conservative” papers from 2007 to 2008 (new figures are out on Monday) [see below for update]:

WSJ                                                  0.0%
NY Post                                           -6.3%
Chicago Trib                                   -7.8%
Dallas Morning News                     -9.3%
Boston Herald                                -9.9%
San Diego Union Tribune               -3.0%
Tampa Tribune                               -2.4%
AZ Republic                                     -5.5%
Indy Star                                          -3.3%
Columbus Dispatch                        -2.9%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                              -3.6%
Washington Post                             -1.9%
Newsday                                           -2.6%

Other than the Wall Street Journal which, along with America’s other national newspaper USA Today held circulation steady, every major paper left and right suffered circulation declines. If readers are abandoning the NY Times at a rate of 3.6 percent because of it’s leftward leanings then we (and Bill) have to conclude that readers are abandoning the NY Post at a rate of 6.3 percent because of it’s rightward leanings. The only logical conclusion? Right-wing rags are in bigger trouble than liberal ones.

C’mon Bill. you can do better than that!

[UPDATE] Now that the new numbers are out the news is even worse for the newspaper business and further demonstrates how far off base Bill is. The “liberal lions” are losing readers far more slowly than the biggest conservative newspapers with the exception of the Wall St. Journal. Indeed the right’s most prized paper, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post lost more readers than almost any other paper in America. Here’s the same list as above showing the most recent circulation figures which were released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations:

WSJ                                               +0.1%
NY Post                                         -20.6%
Chicago Trib                                 -7.4%
Dallas Morning News                   -9.9%
Boston Herald                              -13.6%
San Diego Union Tribune             -9.5%
Tampa Tribune                             -11.4%
AZ Republic                                  -5.7%
Indy Star                                       -9.0%
Columbus Dispatch                     -2.0%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                           -3.6%
Washington Post                          -1.1%
Newsday                                        -3.0%

A Modern Blackbeard

Face it. The most natural American gut reaction to the news about Somali pirates holding an American ship captain hostage is, blow them the f*ck up! And that’s pretty much what the always-level-headed editors at the New York Post advocated on Saturday.

We would urge Washington to bring the melodrama to an immediate end — irrespective of the consequences to the hostage. Failing to do so would paint the Navy — and America — as impotent, making US-flagged vessels even more tempting targets for Somali cutthroats.

In other words, Nuke ‘em!!!!! Oddly, cooler heads prevailed at Rupert Murdoch’s other calm-cool-collected editorial page, the Wall Street Journal.

Amid the crisis Wednesday for the Maersk Alabama cargo ship, Capt. Phillips calculated without hesitation that he would put his life at risk to save the lives of his crew members. He traded one life to save many. In some corners of the nation, that honorable act is also well understood as a show of American strength. General David Petraeus, now head of the U.S. Central Command, will surely seek a way in turn to save Capt. Phillips’ life. That may require patience.

Wow! The WSJ editors urging patience? What’s next? An editorial promoting national health care? Actually the remarkable divergence of opinion between America’s two generally lock-step conservative papers is telling. The Obama Administration finds itself in a murky mess where even the Pentagon is apparently split about how to handle the Somali pirates.

The White House has said the world needs to come together to deal with the larger issue of a lawless country almost ideally situated geographically to wreak havoc on critical shipping lanes. Agreed, but coming back to the subject at hand, hasn’t the world already joined to try and stop the pirates? India, Russia, France, Germany, Portugal, Canada, and others have naval ships patrolling off the 1,880 miles of Somali coastline yet the number of attacks has skyrocketed since last summer — there have been at least 80 attacks since July.

As the administration correctly points out, the problem is Somali pirates aren’t some unified entity that’s easily or even profitably attacked in their beach towns. Indeed the greater threat apparently comes from an Islamist group that is fighting Somali’s Ethiopian-backed government. The Washington Post has a lengthy look at Al-Shabab and why two U.S. Presidents have been reluctant to act with force. It helps to explain why these gangster pirates (which Al-Shabab seems to condemn) have flourished despite the international naval armada — they’ve been a nuisance but not a national security threat.

Now, however, by attacking the rare American-flagged cargo ship (see more on why there are so few, here) the Somali Sopranos of the Sea have attracted the kind of attention they really didn’t want. They hold nearly 250 hostages but until they took one American their business was pretty safe. No more.

The Obama team is well aware that (relatively) minor events like this can balloon into public opinion crises fast. It’s been 3 days (as of Saturday afternoon) since Captain Richard Phillips gave himself over to the pirates to save his crew and ship. At some point patience may prove impractical for both tactical and political reasons and the navy may have to act more assertively.

For now though, Obama has political cover to wait since only the most bloodthirsty armchair warriors are shouting for a military response — even if Captain Phillips dies as a result. Nice, huh?

Lenin's Favorite Read

Monday we asked a question: Would those who blamed Wall Street’s big drop over the last two months on the new man in the White House give Barack Obama credit if the markets soared on news of the Administration’s bank rescue plan? Turns out in the case of the New York Post, of course not.

The Post is often vilified by liberals and applauded by conservatives for what it does print and does say but rarely does anyone notice about what’s missing. Today is a perfect case in point. While virtually every major American newspaper headlines and front pages the rally on Wall Street and links it to investor’s reaction to the Obama bank rescue plan, the Post plants it firmly on page one — of it’s business section — which is in reality page 29.

Much like Russia’s Pravda and other organs of one-party states, the Post is so dishonest and fearful of reporting stories that don’t fit it’s hard right world view that it treats any news that might be seen as benefiting Obama as non-existent. This kind of journalism belongs in Havana and Beijing, not the United States of America.

The funny thing is the Post could have taken the opportunity to argue that Wall Street is actually a fairly bad barometer of the potential quality of the President’s plan. Sure the paper would have been pretty hypocritical since it’s led the charge in claiming every down day is attributable to this Administration but hypocrisy is the life-blood of this tabloid.

Instead by treating yesterday’s rally as if it didn’t happen the Post looks more and more like what it is. A sometimes-funny rag that has no more respect for journalism or it’s readers than the Chinese Communist Party’s Xinhua News Agency — which played the stock market rally third after their lead “Premier: World Should Have Faith in China”.

President Barack Obama on "The Tonight Show" (AP Photo)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (kids: a long time ago people listened to music on things called records and sometimes they got scratched and skipped and played the same little section of a song over and over and over and…oh never mind) Republicans just don’t get it.

The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s “Tonight Show” appearance is so incredibly telling — and sad if you were hoping for a reasonably adept opposition to push back on Barack occasionally. The usual suspects and brothers in arms — The New York Post and Fox News — were agog that the President “yuks it up on Leno as economy burns.”

The Post‘s am-I-a-journalist-or-an-opinionist? Charles Hurt penned a scathing column noting that while the “economy lies in ruin” Obama has “with great fanfare filled out his March Madness basketball bracket before flying off to California to parry and jest with Jay Leno….”

The conservative media was actually just riffing on a theme Republican Senators introduced Thursday during a news conference ostensibly held to discuss the AIG bonus boondoggle. Arizona Senator Jon Kyl set the tone:

He flies off to Los Angeles to be on the Jay Leno show. My suggestion is that he come back — since he’s taken the full responsibility — to get his people together and say ‘I want to know exactly what happened, who did what when and how are we going to prevent this from ever happening in the future, and how can we manage these taxpayer assets in a way to solve the banking and financial institution crisis.’

Putting aside all the times when Democrats were up-in-arms about President Bush doing things like staying on vacation in Texas for days after Katrina hit New Orleans while Republicans defended him there’s a real issue here that we’ve talked about here several times before. The electorate is not what Republicans seem to think it is.

For decades Democrats have sought the support of young voters hoping that this group could be motivated to vote in numbers similar to those of their parents. But it never happens. Sure younger voters have increasingly sided with Dems since the late 80s but the percentage of people over 45 who vote is much higher than the percentage of those under 30 who vote. That hasn’t changed much in 30 years.

What has changed is that those younger voters have become older voters and the Democrats finally cashed in on that demographic truth in the last two elections. In general polling has shown people do tend to become more conservative as they age but not necessarily more Republican. Instead they tend to become more conservative within the party of their youth.

The other change is in the way people in various age groups get their news. Pew does great research about this and in the latest poll released at the end of last year, found that people under 30 now depend on the internet as much as television for their information. And the trend lines heavily favor the internet in the future.

More telling is what kind of television shows these voters get their news from. In another Pew poll released in January 2008, the trend towards people under 30 getting at least some of their campaign news from shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, coupled with that group’s high use of the internet to watch video clips speaks volumes about how a growing number of Americans gain an understanding of what’s going on.

When Obama’s people talk about wanting to “speak directly to Americans” or when Bush talked about going around “the filter” of the mainstream media, both are simply recognizing the truth: All the self-importance of the cable news channels and network anchors is delusional. Even the highly-rated prime-time cable shows (Olbermann, O’Reilly) get a smaller audience of people under 54 years old (a demographic threshold for advertisers and a majority of voters) than the lowest-rated shows on the lowest-rated CW network.

The fact is, reaching the people who will vote in the next election means speaking to them where they are: On the internet, on social-networking sites (Facebook isn’t for college students anymore — Al D’Amato recently friended me!), on You Tube, on late-night comedy shows, on daytime talk shows, on just about anything other than news shows.

So while Republicans and their media supplicants bellyache about Obama’s apparent major miscue of going on Leno, voters don’t really see what all the fuss is about. After all many Americans now get a better understanding of the critical issues facing America from the first 8 minutes of John Stewart than they do from 30 minutes of Couric or Gibson or 60 minutes of Maddow or Hannity or Cooper.

A Small Business

Now that President Obama has officially declared he wants to let the tax rates for those making more than $250,000 per year go back up to pre-2001 levels the flood of faux facts has begun. Chief among them is this one amply explained in a New York Post editorial on Thursday:

“Many of the folks who report $250,000 or more in income are hardly fat cats: They’re hard-working small-business owners who pay taxes on their revenues via their personal income-tax returns. In fact, in the top two income-tax brackets – the ones Obama proposes to squeeze most heavily – a full 80 percent of filers report small-business income.”

Let’s start with that $250K number — and remind everyone that is taxable income meaning what you make after deductions like mortgages, real estate taxes, charitable contributions, health costs, etc. In the case of businesses deductions include expenses like advertising, rent, and supplies.

So are “many” of the folks who reported more than a quarter million in taxable income really “hard-working small-business owners”? No. Of the roughly 150 million people who filed tax forms last year 4.85 million made $250K or more in taxable income. Of those 4.85 million about 625,000 could be considered “small business owners” (as we shall see shortly) which amounts to about 13%. “Many”? Hardly.

Now about the second claim “in the top two income-tax brackets…a full 80 percent of filers report small-business income.” That is accurate but note the Post didn’t say 80 percent of these folks are small business owners. Filing some small business income is obviously very common in these tax brackets but what does it mean? Anything from rental income from an apartment to selling a few hundred bucks were of stuff on eBay every year.

So here’s what’s relevant: As we just noted, last year there were 150 million people who filed tax forms and of those 624,370 reported earning more than $250,000 in taxable income and earning more than 50% of that income from small business activity.

So the number of “small businesses” making more than $250K in taxable income whose taxes would go up under the Obama budget is certainly no more than 624,370 and probably a bit less but let’s keep than number for the sake of argument. What percentage of all the small businesses in America filing personal income taxes does this represent? That’s the bottom line in this argument and the key relevant number everyone should focus on: At the very most 22% of small businesses will pay higher taxes under Obama’s budget.

That’s more than the Administration talks about a less than opponents claim. It is, nonetheless, what the data shows to be true. Certainly there’s an honest debate to be had about whether it’s a good idea to raise taxes on 22% of America’s small business owners this but let’s have it based on facts, not fantasy numbers concocted by partisan flamethrowers. Stick to the facts: 22% of small businesses would pay higher taxes under Obama’s plan.

(If you want to dive into the numbers, grab your calculator and Advils and go to the Tax Policy Center‘s website. The relevant doc to start is here. Have fun!)

One other thing.

Critics complain of Obama’s “Fuzzy math” in citing these bogus numbers but they’ve actually missed some real fuzzy math on the President’s part as pointed out in Thursday’s Washington Post: “And though Obama told Congress on Tuesday that his budget team has “already identified $2 trillion in savings” to help tame record budget deficits, about half of those “savings” are actually tax increases, administration officials said. A big chunk of the rest of the savings comes from measuring Obama’s plans against an unrealistic scenario in which the Iraq war continues to suck up $170 billion a year forever.

That is not the kind of change Obama promised and it is a mistake for him to use the same kind of budget double-talk that George W. Bush became so infamous for. The danger for Obama is how easily one bad deed can poison so many good deeds (i.e. honestly accounting for revenues and expenses for all 10 years of a 10 year budget). Obama should play it straight and demand his opponents (and the lapdog lazy media) do the same.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch

As much as we love to reward those who own up to their mistakes it’s a little hard to take Rupert Murdoch’s mea culpa over the NY Post Chimp-Obama cartoon at face value. Here’s what he wrote in an item place in a small box at the bottom of Page 2 in Tuesday’s Post.

“As the Chairman of the New York Post, I am ultimately responsible for what is printed in its pages. The buck stops with me. Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted. Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. At the same time, I have had conversations with Post editors about the situation and I can assure you – without a doubt – that the only intent of that cartoon was to mock a badly written piece of legislation. It was not meant to be racist, but unfortunately, it was interpreted by many as such. We all hold the readers of the New York Post in high regard and I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.”

Why it took six days for someone in charge at the Post to apologize is a valid question and one the paper’s PR folks have not answered for Get Real yet. But it’s probably a fairly simple case of following the money.

Al Sharpton is meeting with the FCC in Washington tomorrow to discuss the waiver the agency granted Murdoch that allows him to own two TV stations (Channels 5 and 9) and a newspaper (Post) in a single market in violation of Federal law. In the wake of the cartoon Sharpton said he wanted to go not after the newspaper but after the corporate parent and the license waiver was a major benefit to News Corp.

So Rupe’s mea culpa is likely tinged with more than a bit of practicality. Still, at least he said it.

The other mea culpa comes from me. Back at the end of January on the heals of several polls testing what New Yorkers thought of Governor Paterson I wrote: “Pundits be damned, the public is NOT blaming Paterson for the Caroline Kennedy fiasco (and) Paterson is still widely popular, and all things being equal, he is not in a particularly tough position for a campaign that will begin a year from now.”

I continued after noting that one poll showed Paterson to be essentially tied with Andrew Cuomo in a hypothetical primary: “Oooo delicious, right? Not so fast. Andrew Cuomo has clawed his way back to respectability after primarying Carl McCall in 2002 thus earning what looked to be the everlasting enmity of African-American (and plenty of other) Dems who thought it mighty uncool for the brash young scion to try and keep New York from possibly electing it’s first black Governor. So what’s he gonna do now that he’s in (almost) everyone’s good graces? Take on New York’s actual first black Governor? Not on your life unless top African American politicos like Rangel, Sharpton, and some guy named Obama throw Dave over the transom. If that happens there won’t be a primary because Paterson will resign or find himself Ambassador of [insert obscure country here].”

Well, fast-forward one month and Jay doesn’t look so smart any more. A new Siena Poll shows just how badly things have gone from not-so-bad to meltdown. In this survey Paterson’s favorables are now down to 40% with his unfavorables at 47%. The damage is in the suburbs (34%-55%), among women (35%-48%), and worst for him, among Democrats (44%-41%).

Put another way only one quarter of registered Democrats say they would vote for him in 2010 and in that hypothetical primary Cuomo now would beat Paterson 53% – 27%. When Siena then ran hypothetical general election matchups with Rudy Giuliani as the Republican candidate (which some very smart observers believe is a very unlikely prospect for the now wealthy jet-setting former Mayor and failed Presidential candidate) against Paterson or Cuomo, Giuliani handily beats Paterson but Cuomo handily beats Rudy.

So…I was wrong, or at least premature in January to say Paterson was not in a tough position for 2010. He has spent the last month mired in ineffectiveness making his Caroline-Gillibrand kerfuffle look like a stroke of managerial genius. As I noted in January Democrats — especially prominent African American Democrats — will need to make the first move but if Paterson’s performance in the polls is not better by the fall watch the Rangels and Sharptons of this world very closely.

If they move an “irresistible” offer of an ambassadorship to East Wintogia won’t be far behind.

Sean Delonas' Cartoon 2/18/09

Sean Delonas is no stranger to ire. Indeed if his years-long roster of incendiary cartoons for the New York Post are any indication, he lives for it.

There was Freddy Ferrer kissing Al Sharpton’s butt in 2001. The sheep all dressed up for a wedding after same-sex marriage passed in New Jersey. The Muslim terrorists cheering for the Democratic midterm wins in 2006.

Delonas has penned so many apparently anti-gay cartoons that he’s become practiced at denying he’s a homophobe (homophobe? He’s far more likely a homo-something-else considering how obsessed he is with all things gay but that’s for Sean, his therapist, and his closet to discuss).

Yep, the guy’s a dick. But this time he’s actually doing Barack Obama, Democrats, liberals, and African-Americans a favor. Stay with me.

First the cartoon: The dude can’t draw. Right? And what does a crazy story about cops in Connecticut shooting an enraged pet Chimpanzee as it attacked a woman have to do with the stimulus bill? Think hard.

The Post’s $600K/year (in 2005 according to NY Mag) editor, Aussie Col Allan, hazarded a guess: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.”

Maybe in Oz, at a bar, after a couple of bottles cases of Coonawara Shiraz that make sense but here in New York you gotta do better than that.

The Reverend Al Sharpton, whose been pissed at Delonas plenty of times in the past, had his own take: “The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best, given the racist attacks throughout history that have made African-Americans synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual inference to this form of racism when, in the cartoon, the police say after shooting a chimpanzee, ‘now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.’ Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder whether the Post cartoonist was inferring that a monkey wrote it?”

What’s incredible is that Al is actually asking if Delonas meant to been racist. He never bothered with those pleasantries in the past. What’s going on?

Here’s why this is a good thing for Obama, et al. Conservatives have not yet figured out how to fight back after their disastrous showing in November. Remember Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” speech before Inauguration Day? Liberal hands wrung with worry that the Republicans were going to “do a Clinton” on Obama.

Then there was all the anti-stimulus rhetoric — “pork pork pork!” Congressional Republicans shouted until they were hoarse (and many still are…shouting…and hoarse). But Obama got his stimulus bill and Americans think it’s a good bill that will work by roughly the same margin as Obama’s margin of victory in November.

Now Delonas adds his own inciteful commentary to the mix. And the result? Republicans and conservatives look like petulant children who care more about themselves than the good of the country (Rush). Republicans and conservatives look like they care more about their own failed economic theories than they do about fixing the economy (Congressional Repubs and their columnist/talk radio friends). At least the house organ of Republicans and conservatives (NY Post) looks like it thinks depicting black people as primates is totally appropriate (Delonas and Allan).

That’s the old playbook for the old electorate. This is not 1968 (George Wallace). It’s not 1988 (Willie Horton). It’s the year after 2008 when a broad majority of Americans (many of whom were too young to vote in 1988 and most of whom were too young to vote in 1968) elected America’s first African-American President.

Delonas isn’t so much offensive as he is outdated. Cartoonist 1.0 in a 8.0 world. And even Al Sharpton seems to recognize it’s better to get out of the way when your enemies are in the process of destroying themselves.