I gotta confess; I had never watched a full episode of The Colbert Report, until last night.

And that’ll be the last.

Good Lord, what a waste of time.

Note to everyone involved; you don’t need to parody conservative talking heads.  That’s what Glenn Beck is for.

I can’t remember the last time I picked up the City Pages.

The alma mater of the likes of James Lileks and Steve “Mister Furious” Perry, the Pages  – which was sort of a wannabe Village Voice even before the VV’s parent company bought the freebie ‘zine out some decade and a half ago – were once a formidable journalistic operation.  Under Perry, the paper did a lot good, solid reporting; they especially shone at doing the long-form, in depth reporting that the dailies had been de-emphasizing even before the industry’s current woes.

But lately?  Not only do I not pick up the paper from the bins on the street, I don’t even check the website anymore.  Indeed, I don’t even go to the CP’s RSS feed.

Well, OK.  Every week or two I’ll skim the RSS feeds; it’s the lowest possible impact on my day.

And I usually regret it.

Last week, Sun Country Airlines – the Twin Cities-based former charter line which has been trying for a little over a decade to make a go of daily service – announced that they were making changes to their service, including some new destinations.

Bear in mind, Sun Country’s had a bunch of strikes against them; they branched out from the lucrative charter business just in time for the airline industry to go through its huge spasm of contraction.  They had the same fuel price problems, and “nobody’s travelling due to the recession” problems that every other airline’s had.

And then they got bought by alleged ponzi artist Tom Petters.

To their credit, Sun Country had enough business savvy to survive the collapse of Petters’ empire.  And last week, in an attempt to emerge from the situation, they announced some new destinations to try to keep the financial pipeline flowing.

Emily Kaiser takes up the story from her – words fail – uniquely trival perspective:

We were sitting on the edge of our seats today when Sun Country airlines said they would be announcing a new destination from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. We had our eyes on warm weather wonders like Mexico, Puerto Rico, more California.

[Because when Sun Country is figuring out how to survive and keep its hundreds of employees working, “what can we do to attract a bunch of wage serfs from broke “alternative” newspapers” was the first question they answered.  But we digress. – Ed.]

They even had a big announcement out at the Mall of America like this was going to blow all of us away.

Drum roll please…. They are now flying to Branson, Mo.

Wait, what?

Wait what, what?

They’re going to start flying to where people with actual money are going, and where not every airline currently flies.  Because while

More from the FOX:

    

Branson is the 27th city served by Sun Country out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul hub.

The airline will fly to the popular tourist destination Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays and will feature a $79 one-way* introductory fare. Sun Country offers the only non-stop service to Branson out of the Twin Cities.

The Star Tribune tried to look on the bright side. It’s a good wholesome place for losers:

“Losers” with money to spend are something that smart businesspeople call “Winners”. 

For years, Branson has been a popular tourist attraction, with a wholesome lineup of musical acts as a counterbalance to the excesses of Las Vegas.

Among Branson’s offerings of late: ’50s at the Hop, the Oak Ridge Boys and Sunday Gospel Jubilee. “The addition of Branson is a positive step for Sun Country’s future,” said Stan Gadek, chairman and CEO of Sun Country.

We beg to differ. Boring and tarnishing the airline’s image as a carrier that actually brings you to fun and warm places.

Er, Emily?  They still fly to Ixtapa, Cancun, St. Maarten, South Padre, Cozumel, Cabo, Puerto Vallarta…

…all the places they’ve always taken the bobbleheaded children of excessive privilege to marinade their brains in overpriced Sex On The Beaches and ponder why the grownup world is so mean.

Spend a hundred hears arguing about the stupid hamfistedness of most anti-trust legislation?

Crickets.

But let an institution that supports liberal politicans feel the pain, and suddenly every liberal demigogue is a hardened free marketeer:

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, released by Pelosi’s office late Monday, the San Francisco Democrat asked the department to weigh the public benefit of saving The Chronicle and other papers from closure against the agency’s antitrust mission to guard against anti-competitive behavior.”We must ensure that our policies enable our news organizations to survive and to engage in the news gathering and analysis that the American people expect,” Pelosi wrote.

Deep down inside, I think this statement is hilarious; the American people “expect” that newspapers will buff Nancy Pelosi’s toenails for her.  It’s one of the reasons they’re voting with their feet; it’s one of the reasons conservative talk radio is thriving as newspapers are dying.

And I wonder if some congressional bureaucrat was going for laughs when he or she named this subcommittee (emphasis added):

The speaker said the issue of newspapers’ survival and antitrust law will be the subject of a hearing soon before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy, chaired by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga.

Some yuks just come to you.

Why do I suspect the committee’s recommendation will be “while we’re trying to clamp socialism’s lumpen gray veil down over the the rest of the country, we need to make sure reflexively liberal-leaning institutions get the blessings of free enterprise”.

Eric Black reports on the Project for Excellence in Journalism report on the State of the News Media.

It’s an ugly report – you can read the details at MinnPost.  Black’s conclusion:

I heard PEJ chief Tom Rosenstiel (disclosure: Tom and I went to college together less than one century ago; he’s a nice guy) on the radio today say that he doesn’t believe the day when a major American city will have no newspaper is imminent. I agree with that (although what’s happening in Detroit, where you can only get home delivery three days a week is frightening). The papers that have been folding are in two-newspaper towns.

So far.

Again, read the whole article.
On a quasi-unrelated note, I noticed that I haven’t gone to the Strib for blog fodder in quite some time now…

Growing up, I dreamed – among a few other things – of being a news reporter.  Let’s just say it’s a good thing not every dream comes true.

But I digress.

One of my “role models”, of sorts, was “Joe Rossi”, a character played by Robert Walden from the Lou Grant TV series.  One of the things about “Rossi” that I remember admiring, and to which I aspired, was fanatical detachment from everything – groups, people, society – supported by a hard-bitten cynicism about just about everything else.  “Rossi” went overboard, of course; never voted, never joined any groups, never did anything that’d compromise this detachment (which was sent up in a memorable episode in which the rest of the staff, in an orgy of chain-yanking, signed Rossi up for every organization they could – the AARP, the NRA, severel political parties, the AAA…

OK, it was  TV show – but that was one of the things (supported by my later experience and a little formal education in the field) that I carried with me through my brief, fruitless career as a reporter; reporters should have a healthy skepticism about everything.
Including reporters.

And I suspect most reporters would agree – at least as a platitude.

That needs, of course, to be combined with ravenous curiosity (which was one part of the craft that I did get right), including the ability to question ones’ own gaps and, dare I say, preconceptions.  We’ll come back to that.

“Skepticism”, of course, has its limits.  Reporters are human; they follow baseball teams, they read books, they vote – they have preferences.  None of them – not even “Joe Rossi” – attains their perfect ideals, whatever thepy are. So it’s not a surprise that, among other sins, reporters are just as big a bunch of fanboys as the rest of us, when you get down to it.  Or so it’d seem, seeing the coverage of Seymour Hersh’s appearance last week at the U of M, as partof the U’s “Great Conversations” program.

I didn’t go – I don’t think the “U” is especially aggressive about inviting non-believers to these things, but I have no idea, honestly.

But it was all over the place; Hersh dropped a few “bombs” (as reported by the local media, who did attend in droves) that got picked up by the big leftymedia.

More on that angle in a bit.

Eric Black of the MinnPost was there:

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Heady stuff!

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Of course, when it comes to “covert executive assassination squads”, you don’t have to do a lot of “dwelling” for the story to grab attention, do you?

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

Hersh, who is most famous (recently) for releasing the Abu Ghraib story (which the Army had been investigating, and which CBS was sitting on at government request) must be complimented for his focus on “empiricism”.

You might be too, if you’d had enough of your claims – apparently the less-“empirical” ones – turn out to be complete squibs.  I’ll direct you to this story from two years ago; Hersh claimed (amid a flurry of publicity) that US Special Forces were operating in Iran, preparatory to a US invasion.  It’s a claim that’d seem to have fallen down the memory hole; I have read no accounts of any of the journalists present at this or any other appearance questioning Hersh about it.
So perhaps it’s a good thing he’s waiting.  Except for the whole “Dropping the bomb in a talk at the U of M” bit.

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

Or, in Mondale’s case, were intimately involved in causing the crises.

Again, I digress.

Black continues:

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Viethnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

Nothing like working a relentlessly friendly room.

That’s not a digression.

We’re getting into the interesting stuff here:

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

And we’ll wait for the evidence on that.

I’m not saying I doubt it, necessarily – it’s just that I hope Mr. Hersh isn’t too busy waiting for the invasion of Iran to show us the evidence.  Someday.

Now, here we get into the part of the story where it might have been useful to have some journalists in the room with Mr. Hersh:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

Let’s take a brief time-out here.

Re-read Hersh’s explanation of JSOC.  Assuming Black is reporting his words accurately (and I’ve expressed my complete confidence in the honest of Eric Black’s reporting in the past), Hersh explains JSOC as if…:

1. He expects nobody has heard of it (probably not an unfair assumption, given his audience)
2. He wants people to believe that its status is something unique, sinister, and unique to the Bush Administration.

It’s buncombe, of course.  Joint Special Operations Command was established so that key, vital, high-risk special operations – hostage rescues, counterterrorist missions and the like – could take place without the paralyzing overburden of the military’s bureaucracy and its effects on these types of operations.

And it reports to the Executive Branch – the Secretary of Defense – rather than Congress; of course, the entire Executive Branch reports to the Executive Branch!  But JSOC is isolated from much of the miltiary’s bureaucracy; it does things that need to be done without bringing 535 other commanders into the chain of command.  JSOC reports to the Secretary of Defense, and thence to the President and Congress.

This chain of command – directly to the highest ranks of power – was established  after an infamous military disaster caused by, among other things, interservice bureaucracy, and micromanagment by civilian officials.

The disaster was “Desert One”.  And the order to create JSOC came from President Jimmy Carter.  The boss of Hersh’s fellow guest on the panel, former Vice President
Walter Mondale.

A roomful of journalists might have known that.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

And I’m sure we’ll wait for evidence of the “executions”, in Hersh’s book, upcoming in a year or so.

But barring that “evidence”, there’s a point of order here:  the military doesn’t have to clear its operations with ambassadors or the CIA!  The military doesn’t report to either of them!

There’s no question that JSOC – the umbrella for the US’ clandestine military, including the Joint Special Operations Detachment Delta (“Delta Force”) and the Navy’s DEVGRU (formerly “Seal Team Six”) – does things that aren’t supposed to see the light of day.  And some of these things are by their very nature controversial.  Mark Bowden chronicled the Clinton-era use of JSOC troops to track and kill Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar; one wonders where the chorus of demands for constitutional due process were back then?

It’s not an idle question for any democracy; in the UK during “The Troubles”, Britain’s Special Air Service – the unit that “Delta” and many of the world’s other special forces are modeled after – garnered decades of controversy in its clandestine surveillance and, in some cases, direct action against the IRA.  While Britain’s constitution recognizes a closer relationship between the military and civil authority than we have in the US – something that helped spawn our tradition of Posse Comitatus, in fact – it’s the sort of thing that a free society needs to watch out for and be aware of.

But, until we get Hersh’s “evidence”, really, all we have is innuendo
A roomful of journalists might have known this, and asked Hersh to square his account with history and, while we’re at it, JSOC’s stated organization, oversight structure and (since it can be reasonably assumed Walter Mondale was there) three-decade-long mission.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Really?

Why?

Because the Obama Administration has found that there’s nothing illegal about what Bush sent JSOC to do?  Distasteful to modern, urban, urbane, small-l-liberal (and usually big-l-Liberal) products of the university system, perhaps, but not illegal?  Indeed, necessary under the circumstances – just as Jimmy Carter found when he plugged the whole thing in three decades ago?

A roomful of journalists might not have known this – but, armed by the skepticism that I and probably not a few of them used to think was a key part of the trade, you’d have thought someone might have asked.

A roomful of star-struck hero worshippers?  Not so much.

Am I being unfair in characterizing the room – people paralyzed, if not by Walter Mondale’s suffocating gravitas, by Hershs’ reputation as, as Black put it…:

…the best-known investigative reporter of his generation…

…as a bunch of star-struck fanboys? Who are acting like the shrimp-league lefty commenter on Marty Owings’ show last weekend whose entire line was “who are you to question Sy Hersh?”

Maybe.

But just as someone has to question the government – and its servants, like JSOC – someone needs to subject Seymour Hersh to some skepticism, too.

And I’m sure that roomful of Journalists will do just that.

After Hersh gets done covering that invasion of Iran he warned us about.

I’ve long held that “Codes of Journalistic Ethics” aren’t ethics codes in the sense that laypeople understand, but merely frameworks to allow journalists to justify bad behavior.

Likewise, National Public Radio’s “On The Media” seems to exist primarily to give a big, fat “attaboy” to liberal bias in the media.

Over the weekend, OTM host Bob Garfield did an interview (of sorts) with one of the editors of the Wikileaks website. Wikileaks oozed its way into Minnesota political life this past week by publishing…well, we’ll get back to that.

From OTM’s website:

The site Wikileaks posts leaked documents from anonymous whistleblowers worldwide, even if those documents pose a danger or could potentially lead to loss of life. Julian Assange, the site’s investigations editor, explains why Wikileaks publishes almost anything it receives.

The story (which you should listen to, if you haven’t already) mentions the Coleman incident – Garfield notes that the “whistleblowing” involved revealing the names and other personal data of 52,000 people – but focuses more on Wikileaks’ version of “journalism”.

The interview with Mr. Assange focuses mainly on Wikileaks’ perceived justification for broadcasting leaks, as well as for doing it largely anonymously.  That is, of course, a subject for an upper-division J-school seminar.

But Garfield missed the question that I suspect a lot of people would love to ask Mr. Assange:

“Mr. Assange:  Imagine if you will a story about a serial rapist.  The story mentions the serial rapist, but focuses entirely on identifying the rapist’s victims and digging up personal dirt about them.  Is that good journalism?”

“Of course not.  Now – since Wikileaks claims to be “journalism”, tell me; if the “story” your “whistleblower” claimed to have uncovered was the security bobble with Coleman’s website, why were the identies of the 50,000-odd victims any more relevant than the identies of the rape victims?”

“Of course  you can’t answer that question.  Because for all you talk about being true journalists, you’re nothing but a bunch of ideology-driven intellectual vandals, hiding behind a label that you only recognize the most self-serving, solopsistic aspects of”.

That would have made it a good story.

…when a smug, preening, pseudo-Ivy-league prettyboy who has convinced a generation of bobbleheads that snark is news and who couldn’t tie his shoes without a couple of writers and producers working the angles for him…

…is the closest thing we have to a financial journalist these days:

Jon Stewart hammered Jim Cramer and his network, CNBC, in their anticipated face-off on “The Daily Show,” repeatedly chastising the “Mad Money” host for putting entertainment above journalism.”I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a … game,” Stewart told Cramer, adding in an expletive during the show’s Thursday taping. The episode was scheduled to air at 11 p.m. EDT on Comedy Central.

Outside conservative talkradio, anyway.

The notion that NBC is talking about blurring the line between ads and “content” to meaninglessness…:

NBC Digital’s Cameron Death speaks to Media Post about the future of NBC’s product.

“There’s a challenge and an opportunity within the next two years, where the brand can become the content,” he said.

That sounds like the creation of some very long commercials.

…or that I got the news from Justine Bateman’s Twitter feed.

Speaking of “The Surge” Mitch, Erik Sorenson, Emmy-Winning TV Executive and former President of MSNBC has some advice for executive-level job-seekers:

The word “surge” got a bad rap during Hurricane Katrina when related to Gulf waters breaching the levees and flooding into New Orleans.

In some circles, it was further tarnished when used to describe troop buildups in Iraq (though that Surge is now widely believed to have been effective).

Wow, Erik. Can I quote you on that?

Now, the word surge is being used to describe hiring mandates for government agencies and programs funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – informally known as “President Obama’s economic stimulus package.”

Dude. No one I know is calling the Stimuless Package “The Surge.” What you heard was “The Scourge.”

…or was it “The Gouge?”

…or the “Re-Gurge.”

The legislation from Congress requires certain agencies to hire high volumes for mission critical programs. And the challenges facing those agencies (overhaul the health-care system, police new banking regulations, dismantle our dependence on oil) also require a higher quality of executives, managers and team leaders. And the technical nature of the challenges requires federal employees with more specialized skill-sets.

All the more reason these programs should be left with the private sector – save regulating the banking industry – let’s leave that to Barney Frank.

There is no shortage of wonderful, qualified people currently unemployed and looking for quality work, so what’s the problem? “The federal government is a terrible recruiter,” according to Max Stier – President of the Partnership for Public Service – a nonprofit group which promotes federal employment. Stier notes that private companies out-recruit the public sector in the trenches and that it often takes six to nine months to get a hiring decision.

How ironic is it that a bloated and inefficient federal government can’t become more bloated and inefficient, even under mandate from Congress and the President…because it’s so bloated and inefficient.

If you are a capable executive or manager who is part of the 8.1% jobless, you might be interested in government work.

If you are an executive or manager, we can probably assume you are college educated, and among college graduates, unemployment is only 4.2% according to the latest data, unless you consider the “seasonally adjusted number” which is 4.1%; either way, only 2% more than a year ago.

So, probably not.

…a properly executed recovery effort will lift the economy.

We’ll be sure to alert you if a properly executed recovery effort is in the offing.

Finally, our economy’s ability to sustain America for the next generation (your kids) and the one after that (your grandkids) [thanks for explaining what generation means Erik-JR] will be very dependent on government decision-makers and their success in engineering an improved health-care system, innovation in the energy industry, an upgrade in our schools and the impending overhaul of the financial and auto industries.

Nice try, Erik. I think you meant our economy’s ability to sustain America for the next generation (my kids) and the one after that (my kids’ kids) will be in spite of government decision-makers.

You keep drinking that Kool-Aid, Erik. Tell us when your leg stops tingling too.

The Democrats, playing from the Chomsky playbook and using their hegemony in the mainstream media to shape opinion, have been trying to create a false choice in the minds of the vast, non-affiliated “middle” in American politics; asking “Is Rush Limbaugh the voice of the GOP?”, while quite deliberately setting up and glorifying non-conservatives (Chuck Hagel and Arlen Spector nationally; regionally, the likes of Lori Sturdevant burn lots of cycles setting up the likes of Ron Erhard as “responsible” Republicans, which translates to “indistinguishable from the DFL in every particular”).as an “alternative”.

The normally-very-sharp David Frum buys into the madness, playing the Dems’ game for them.

So who’s the voice of conservatism and the GOP in America?

Me.

I, Mitch Berg, am the voice of the Republican party.  My agenda – support growth, limit government intrusion, destroy the enemy (via violence, dipomacy or humanitarianism, it matters not), cut taxes, support the family, defend our culture – is what the party’s agenda should be.

Having an agenda, of course, is of little value if you can’t get it elected.  Republicans – conservative, moderate, whatever – need to get together, figure out the 80% of the message that 80% of us agree on, and convince the other 50% of this country (the ones that aren’t already either Republicans or lost causes) why it not only matters to them, but is a much better choice.  By this time next year, it might not even be all that hard – if we can stop letting the bad guys set us against each other.

So yeah.  I’m the voice of the GOP.

Of course, so are all of my True North colleagues.

And every conservative Republican in Minnesota who doesn’t write for True North, or write at all.

Also every conservative in America, from Rush Limbaugh and Tom Coburn through the guy in the plumbing supply store in Clear Lake Iowa who’s wondering how he’s going make ends meet.

There’s your voice of conservatism.

Note to the liberal media; I hope that settles this.

Speaking of which – I see Kathleen Soliah, the voice of the Minnesota DFL, is coming back to the state…

I hope your effort to institute socialilsm fails, too.

 In fact, I hope it fails even more than Rush does!

By the way, all of you – my show is the Northern Alliance Radio Network, Volume II, heard every Saturday from 1-3PM Central on AM1280 in the Twin Cities, or at Town Hall for podcasts.

No, really. Fail fail fail. Not you, Mr. President, personally, but your policies, yes. Definitely.

Feel free to sic your dogs on Ed and I. Really. Please hop to it!

One side effect of the Democratic campaign against Rush Limbaugh has been to increase — dramatically increase — the talk show host’s ratings.

This morning I asked Rush if he had any numbers he could share on just what effect the increased visibility has had on his business. This is his response:

The latest numbers I have are for January, well before this kerfuffle began, and they are through the roof — six shares in NY, for example. There are daily ratings taken now in about the top 15 markets but I have not seen them yet. All I can tell you is that as of January, we booked 80 percent of all our 2008 revenue and we’ll be over 2008 by the end of this month.

Given those numbers, it’s clear that the most decisive economic stimulus produced by the Obama administration so far has been at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

Socialism bad!

You’re Nancy Pelosi’s lapdog!

You’re destroying the market!

Who the hell does Michelle’s hair? T

hat should give you and your staff plenty to respond to. Please see to this. Thanks.

…or is it me warming to Jim Cramer, just a little bit.

When I come to work each day, whether as a commentator for TheStreet.com or a host of Mad Money With Jim Cramer, I have only one thought in mind: helping people with their money.

Okay, that part is not entirely accurate if ye be judged by your results. You’re an entertainer whose stock-picking advice at least has been shown to be dead on if one’s goal is to generate losses.

I fight to help viewers and readers make and preserve capital. I fight for their 401(k)s, for their 529s and their IRAs. I fight for their annuities and for their life insurance policies. I fight for their profits, trading and investing. And in this horrible market, I fight to keep their losses to a minimum by having some good dividend-yielding stocks from different sectors, some bonds, some gold and some cash.

Sorry Jim, I’m not a fan. Jim Cramer: A Stream of Uncalibrated Opinion

I work with real clients and real money, and people like you and Suze only confuse my clients more and make my job harder.

…but despite all that, I’m warming up to you of late:

Limbaugh’s dead right. I am a fight-not-flight guy, so I was on my hackles when I heard White Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ answer to a question about my pointed criticism of the president on multiple venues, including the Today Show.

Well, in case you didn’t know this Jim, Gibbs is a pompous ass and likely knows less about the market and economics than his boss.

“I’m not entirely sure what he’s pointing to to make some of the statements,” Gibbs said about my point that President Obama’s budget may be one of the great wealth destroyers of all time. “And you can go back and look at any number of statements he’s made in the past about the economy and wonder where some of the backup for those are, too.”

Huh? Backup? Look at the incredible decline in the stock market, in all indices, since the inauguration of the president, with the drop accelerating when the budget plan came to light because of the massive fear and indecision the document sowed: Raising taxes on the eve of what could be a second Great Depression, destroying the profits in healthcare companies (one of the few areas still robust in the economy), tinkering with the mortgage deduction at a time when U.S. house price depreciation is behind much of the world’s morass and certainly the devastation affecting our banks, and pushing an aggressive cap and trade program that could raise the price of energy for millions of people.

The market’s the effect; much of what the president is fighting for is the cause. The market’s signal can’t be ignored. It’s too palpable, too predictive to be ignored, despite the prattle that the market’s predicted far more recessions than we have.

Obama has undeniably made things worse by creating an atmosphere of fear and panic rather than an atmosphere of calm and hope. He’s done it by pushing a huge amount of change at a very perilous moment, by seeking to demonize the entire banking system and by raising taxes for those making more than $250,000 at the exact time when we need them to spend and build new businesses, and by revoking deductions for funds to charity that help eliminate the excess supply of homes.

Jim, your stock picks may be right less than half the time, but you are 100% correct today.

Just don’t throw a chair at the President. That’d be bad.

…did anyone catch Mischke’s debut at the City Pages yesterday?

The CP has fallen so far off my list of regular browses, I gotta confess it didn’t even occur to me to try to listen yet.

Anyone?

UPDATE:  Um, City Pages?  For the benefit of those who work day jobs, and whose companies’ firewalls choke down most live streaming – would it kill you to actually post the damn show?

Thanks.

I don’t read the “City Pages” all that much – while ten years ago it frequently did better long-form reporting than the dailies, today it’s a glorified college paper/ad handout.

Still, it’s good for the occasional laugh.

We’ve discussed Emily Kaiser before.  She seems to have inherited the political beat from the likes of GR Anderson and Mike Mosedale (themselves guys with, let’s say, opportunities as political reporters and commentators).

And like a lot of inheritances, it’s not working all that well, in this piece entitled “Republicans Don’t Really Like Pawlenty”.  See if you can figure out the problem with that premise before Ms. Kaiser does.  I’ll add emphasis for the benefit of anyone who takes the City Pages seriously:

The Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll must have been a real blow to Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s confidence this weekend. It turns out Republicans don’t like him much. He was seriously beat out by real winners in life: Gov. Bobby Jindal (Kenneth the Page) and Gov. Sarah Palin. That really hurts.

At CPAC’s annual conference Saturday in Washington, Republicans participated in a straw poll of potential 2012 presidential candidates. Pawlenty received just 2 percent of the vote, was second to last, and only beat out Charlie Crist.

Kaiser misses the blazingly obvious, even though she write the answer in black and white.

Emilyi It was the Conservative Political Action Conference!  Not the “Republican Political Action Conference”. Many Republicans are not conservatives.  Many – Chuck Hagel, Jim Ramstad, Ron Erhard, Olympia Snowe – are indistinguishable from Democrats.
And while you, Emily, are a Minnesota liberal who would seem to have trouble telling Arne Carlson apart from Rush Limbaugh, Pawlenty is no doctrinaire conservative.  Oh, he ran to the right to get nominated in 2002; he’s tried, against increasingly long odds, to hold the line on the the DFL’s psychotic spending.

But – and I realize this is tough for you, Emily, who have no doubt been trained to think that Republicans and Conservatives are monochrome thud-wits – Pawlenty is not seen as a movement conservative.

So the “Conservative Political Action Conference” might be expected to vote for…

…what?

Conservatives.

Like Romney and Jindal and Palin, and not the likes of Pawlenty and Crist.

It’s not a sign that Pawlenty’s in trouble with Repblicans.  It’s a sign that he either has to burnish his credentials among conservatives (and I think conservatives sell him short) or hope that there is a sea of disenfranchised moderates out there.

The press is doing its job, asking the Administration the tough questions.

Like How do Michelle Obama’s arms get so fabulous?

The Obama effect has been that women of all ages have been inspired to take responsibility for their health and their body,” said Duggan. “As the first lady of the United States, at 44 years old, and with two young children, Mrs. Obama has shown the world that you are never too busy to take care of yourself and look good doing it too,” he said.

Ooh.  That’ll leave a mark.

And how about that crucial question – what soft drink does the Administration prefer?

Is Pepsi actually the choice of the Obama Administration?

My reporting at the White House suggests the answer is a resounding no. Several senior Administration officials are committed cola drinkers, and without fail they spend their days sipping from a can of Diet Coke, a product of Pepsi’s chief competitor, Coca-Cola.

The American media; “defending freedom” since 2000 until 2008.

The last couple of weeks have seen big news in the local talkradio community – albeit for very different reasons.

This week, former KSTP host and cult object Tom Mischke will start an internet-based talk show, affiliated with formerly-readable boutique freebie ‘zine The City Pages.

David Brauer at the MinnPost writes:

Of course, Tommy Mischke is a rare bird; for two decades on KSTP-AM, he somehow blended content and advertising in a way that generated fierce listener and advertiser loyalty. But when Mischke was fired from AM1500 and disowned commercial radio, few thought he could replace his radio income on the Internet.

Without getting into specifics, let’s just say he did amazingly well. But it didn’t happen without help from a much-mocked legacy medium: print.

Internet advertising alone wouldn’t pay the freight for a 2-4 p.m. weekday show (beginning March 4 at citypages.com). But advertisers did pony up enough for a print-web combo that Mischke secured a one-year deal. He’ll also do a weekly column in the paper.

The benefit for City Pages? It was able to get around a corporate hiring freeze because most costs were covered on Day One, and its reps now have a new selling opportunity.

To someone who’s been in media, off and on, for most of his adult life, it’s a bit of a departure.  In traditional entertainment media, the “owner” of the show bets long – produces and airs a program (including hiring and, indirectly or directly, paying the air and support talent) based on the potential for ratings and the money they might bring.

Mischke’s model is different; he’s bringing his advertisers – some of his big backers from his long-running KSTP show – with him.

Will it work in the long term?  Does internet narrowcasting draw enough ears to make it work?  Has the City Pages – a fairly pathetic shell of its former self, journalistically speaking – got the mojo to serve as the fiscal and demograhic bedrock for a cult figure like Mischke?

Given the singular history and qualities of its namesake, the “Mischke Model” may be tough to replicate, and its long-term success remains unknown. But it does show how old and new media can be woven together. The Strib, PiPress — hell, the local edition of the Onion — might’ve pulled this off. Perhaps they can rig up something like it.

Perhaps they can – yes, indeed.  We’ll come back to that.

I am, of course, a big Mischke fan.  I’m a fan, of course, because he’s a real original, wildly creative, and just plain fun to listen to.

For a good chunk of the Twin Cities intelligentsia, of course – the likes of Garrison Keillor, Brian Lambert and, if I may be so bold, David Brauer – Mischke is more than that.  He’s a thumb in the eye of the “establishment” in talk radio, standing defiantly against the tide of conservative programs. And in some respects, I can even go along with that; while I disagree with whatever politics Mischke likely believes, I much preferred “The Mischke Broadcast” to the likes of Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck; Mischke clobbered the lesser ranks of conservative hosts in all ways that matter to the likes of Keillor, Lambert, Brauer – that is, everything but ratings and revenue.
“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?”

Brauer’s point seems to be that to get anything “interesting” on “the air”, one needs to get creative.  Outlets like City Pages are floundering; shows like Mischke’s, long KSTP run notwithstanding, have always been fish out of water in the radio industry.

And there might be something to that.  Outlets like the Pioneer Press might do well to ally themselves with other media outlets; a content and advertising alliance between, say, the Pioneer Press, AM1280, and one or more internet content and video operations (like “The Uptake” and “True North”, to pick out some random examples) would provide some interesting cross-media possibilities, not only for advertising and opinion content but – cue the drum roll – journalism.

So, if you take Brauer’s piece at face value, it’d seem that “interesting”, “creative” media’s future is going to depend on a concerted do it yourself effort.

Unless – Brauer doesn’t go into this in his piece on Mischke – you operate in a format that’s actually succeeding, even despite the current advertising economy.

Salem Radio Network’s ad inventory is reportedly pretty well sold out.   Rush Limbaugh’s salary is greater than the Paraguayan military budget. And long-time local radio fixture Jason Lewis is, as of last week, in the big show: That’s worth a separate article.

Anyway, the lesson – as filtered through the lens of the “progressive” “alternative” media, is this:  the current media landscape requires creativity to survive.  Unless you’re a huge success, in which case we ignore it all.

First things first; congrats to the MinnPost’s David Brauer on having his first ambulance ride end fairly benignly.

And yes – it is certainly a small world. Brauer called an ambulance after experiencing shortness of breath and chest pains:

The Minneapolis fire guys were there immediately; their quick read of my vitals didn’t scream heart attack. A minute or so later, the ambulance crew was on the scene. After being appraised of my non-demise, the crew’s paramedic asked me a question I wasn’t expecting:

“Hey David, do you recognize me?”

He did look vaguely familiar.

“Duke Powell.”

I laughed even though it hurt.

Although we’ve never met face-to-face, Duke and I are Twitter friends. Via @dbrauer, I follow him at @dukepowell.

The saga, to an extent, did play out on Twitter over the weekend.  Duke is a longtime friend of this blog, a former GOP representative from the Burnsville area who lost a heartbreaker of a race in 2006.

Burnsville’s loss is the first-responder profession’s gain, of course, as Brauer found:

Of course, politics doesn’t matter much when you’re strapped to a gurney and wheeled through the snow. But it was definitely reassuring to have a member of my social network be part of my survival network…Duke expertly threaded my IV (the nurses would later marvel at the precision), gave me the short course on nitroglycerin (a precaution; headaches approaching) and kept it light but not unprofessional. In short, his actions buttressed the trust we’d already established.

Brauer waxes just a tad philosophical:

Our politics are as different as can be (Duke was a conservative Republican legislator from Burnsville), but we’re both Coleman-Franken junkies. For some reason, Twitter has been a place where lefties and righties can actually talk to each other; perhaps it’s because the medium is young, or you pick who you follow.

There’s something to that – although Minnesota is blessed with many forums where people can talk across the aisle:  the Northern Alliance Radio Network earned kudos from Mayor Rybak for our interview with him; the MDE/MNPublius Happy Hour last summer was a lot of fun.  And this Saturday’s MOB party should be like all previous ones; a fun, utterly civil time for everyone involved.

Oh, yeah – there’s more good news; Duke’s finally blogging:

If you want to read Duke’s version, check out his new Ambulance Driver blog. I’m Patient #5 on Feb. 27. Don’t worry; Duke doesn’t violate patient confidentiality here — I’m the one outing myself.

Hope both Brauer and Powell can show up on Saturday, and re-enact the scene – substituting Guinness for the nitro, natch.

Buckle in.  There’s gonna be flak:

It’s Steve Perry, formerly of the City Pages, Daily Mole and The Minnesoros “Independent”.  These days, he’s working for Sarah Janecek’s essential Politics In Minnesota. 

And – mirabile dictu – he’s discovered that, as a result of the DFL’s “listening tour”, people really are happy to pay for a Better Minnesota government that wants for nothing whatsoever:

Last night I spent some time talking to a DFL House member who has attended some of the budgetary road shows (“listening sessions”) that legislators have been staging around the state in the past week-plus. There was an air of surprise about his words. “Look,” he said by way of preface, “the people attending these things are a self-selected group. It’s not scientific. But it really struck me that people get the fact we can’t do this”–fix the state’s $6 or $7 billion budget gap, that is–“with spending cuts alone. Revenue has to be up for discussion. Real people are saying that, not just organized interests or the official representatives of groups.”

Was he saying the public is ahead of the politicians on this one?

I’m sure he was saying exactly that. 

Or at least, the carefully–stacked selection of the public that the DFL is pimping out at these “listening tour” stops.

Danger!  Flak!

Stimulus dollars go to turning capable journalists into gabbling, addlepated, conspiracy-theory-mouthing ninnies!

No, really!

Taxdollars are being used to train Pioneer Press in what I do, when I am not paid!

That’d be Grace Kelly, over at The Heartbreak of Spirochaetal Paresis Minnesota Short Bus Project.

So whaddya think, all you journos out there; you wanna get paid to do what Grace Kelly does – babble like a half-trained macaw?

Everyone knows one; the neighborhood Jeremiah.

He’s the guy who hangs out at the hardware store, stocking up on the one hand, ranting about the “Trilateral Commission undercutting our currency” and proclaiming that “in five years the United States’ll be like Red China” on the other.  He was a survivalist before the term became a dirty word; he’s positive that the end of civilization is nigh, and he never stops talking about it.

Or should I say, never stopped.  Because you knew him during the Carter and first term of the Reagan Administration.And though you last talked with him twenty years ago, and wonder if American Idol isn’t evidence that he was at least partially correct, you still recall the sense of crushing fatigue his harangues left wafting over you.

Glenn Beck does that to me.

Allahpundit talks about Beck:

Even before watching this, if you’d asked me which media star’s most likely to turn survivalist, move to the mountains, and start doing his show from a lead-lined bunker, there’s no doubt what the answer would have been. There’s something “off” about Beck in a way that’s not true of other chat-show hosts, although that’s not necessarily a criticism: O’Reilly and Hannity can be tiresome in more than small doses but this guy I find watchable even at a stretch. Partly it’s the sheer bravado of the performance, partly it’s the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on in his head to make him the way he is. As big an audience as he has, I’m surprised it’s not bigger. He’s one of a kind.

Look, don’t get me wrong; it’s always prudent to be prepared for emergencies; putting extra food by is just plain smart; anyone who doesn’t have guns and ammo laid in isn’t really all that American anyway.

And he’s right, in the sense that all real conservatives are right; this country has painted itself into a corner, with endless entitlement spending and the stupid, neo-socialist policies of the past ten years that privatized the fruits of greed but socialized the results of stupidity.

But – how do I put this – Glenn Beck bores me just as silly as his equally-nutty, slightly less listenable forebears in nuttiness do. This nation is in a bind – and this current trough in the business cycle is just the beginning – and The One’s policies seem sure to keep the bind going for a nice long time.

But more than any other talk show host – more than O’Reilly, vastly more than Hannity or Limbaugh or anyone in the Salem or TRN stables of hosts – when I listen to Beck, I feel like I’m listening to someone who regards the whole mess as less than a blight on the nation he loves and the society that allows him to earn a living doing what he does than as material.
I know he has fans out there.  Let me break this down for you; stop.

Whenever I bag on Beck, his fans write in to defend him. Feel free.  But be advised; you’re wrong.

Paul Schmelzer, writing for the Minnesoros “Independent”, barks on command:

It occurs to me that there is a rather simple pattern to [Rep. Michele] Bachmann’s belief system, ” writes Jason Linkins on Huffington Post. “…[I]f it was a rumor on the interwebs, Bachmann believes it!” Indeed, on this very page we speculated that Bachmann’s 2007 claim to know about plans to partition Iraq to “create a terrorist safe haven zone” may have come from a satirical posting online.

So because “Jason Linkins” – a person so thud-witted he uses the word “interwebs” in an apparently unironic sense – says it, and gives two examples, it must be true!

Hang in there, Paul; you might be able to get a job with Dump Bachmann at this rate.

I mean, while Schmelzer circulates the internet-spawned meme that Bachmann (and all “fundies”) be dum, he works for a “news” outlet that thinks lefty conventional wisdom (and the Colbert Report) are unimpeachable sources, with comical results.

I report.  You deride.

Since pitchers and catchers are working out down south – you know what I’d like to see this baseball season?  I’d like to see all of the teams in the major leagues work together, so that all of them win the World Series this season!

Absurd?  Of course.  To most of us.

But to those who fuss over “bipartisanship”? Not as absurd, as Thomas Frank points out in a partly-correct series of observations in the WSJ:

The way I remember it, the No. 1 issue in the election was the collapsing economy, followed at some distance by the Iraq war. On both of these questions, Mr. Obama prevailed because he was the candidate who promised most convincingly to reverse Republican policies — not because he planned to meet the GOP halfway across the charred ruins of American prosperity.

The reason the Washington media think bipartisanship is the top issue, even when economic disaster stomps Americans like Godzilla, is because of the way it reflects their own professional standards. They are themselves technically impartial, and so it’s only natural for them to wish for a hazy millennium in which everyone else in Washington is impartial, too.

As anyone familiar with the incestuous relationship between the media and the left in Minnesota knows, Frank has it only partly correct.   The media do see themselves as technically impartial, but they’re not; they’ve merely redefined their own biases as “the norm” as far as the public is concerned.

“Bipartisanship” means “everybody working together to do things our way”; see every Lori Sturdevant column ever written for prime examples of how this manifests in real life.

Frank does get this part right:

It is supposed to be high-minded stuff, this longing for a bipartisan golden age. But in some ways it is the most cynical stance possible. It takes no idea seriously, since everything is up for compromise. The role of the political parties is merely to cancel each other out, so that only the glorious centrists remain, triangulating majestically between obnoxious extremes.

…before proving that he is himself from Planet Beltway:

What’s more, bipartisanship’s boosters can’t even discern friend from foe. The Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, which seems to be growing even more conservative as its numbers shrink, has clearly resumed the strategies of the early Gingrich era — obstruction, bomb-throwing and more obstruction. But to the mainstream media, the angry Republican pols seem to mainly discredit Mr. Obama, who failed to win over the GOP. Which will, of course, encourage the bitter-enders to obstruct even more.

Never has Beltway orthodoxy looked as clueless and futile as it does today. Confronted with the greatest failure of economic ideas in decades, it demands that the president make common cause with people for whom those failed ideas are still sacred. To think we can solve our problems in this way is like hoping to chart a route to the moon by water.

That’d be the cheap irony of this situation; the Republicans spent the last four years as they did the years from 1936 to 1976; governing like Democrats.

We have political parties because people believe different things; while at the end of the day people will reach a compromise (provided they don’t run back to their corner of the country and grab their followers and their weapons – and after 233 years, we’re still avoiding that fairly well), the point, as I wrote last year, is not to cast away the highlights of ones own beliefs cheaply, but to pull like mad for them to affect and inform the final compromise.

In other words, “Bipartisanship” comes after you reach the final result of everyone pulling for their partisan beliefs.
They say “politics isn’t bean-bag”; it’s not just because some people ignore common civility.  “Politics” comes from the same root as “polite”; it’s not just the art of compromise,but the art of advantageous compromise; of “Getting to Yes”.

I’m going to give a wedgie – rhetorically, probably – to the next idiot “journalist” to carp about “bipartisanship”.
(Via Chad the Tweeter)

No wonder the libs want the “Fairness” doctrine; the market is rejecting their material like badly-matched transplant organs.

Nova M – Sheldon Drobny’s second attempt at a LibTalk network after Air America’s initial meltdown – has coded, taking Randee Rhodes and Mike Malloy with it:

Randi Rhodes’ on-air home for less than a year will shut its doors. In an email message of February 17th from counsel for Nova M Radio, Inc. to Randi’s entertainment attorney, Robert V. Gaulin, the company is said to have been advised to file for bankruptcy protection next week. All payroll deposits were reversed on Tuesday, leaving Nova’s employees unpaid for the past two weeks.On Sunday, Nova received a letter from Mr. Gaulin asserting that the contract with Ms. Rhodes was terminated due to material breaches and other reasons. Ms. Rhodes had not broadcast for over a week prior to this time, a situation which was diplomatically referred to as a “problem” that was solely within Nova’s control to solve. A few days earlier, Sheldon Drobny, founder of Nova M, and a co-founder of Air America Radio, attempted suicide and is hospitalized in Chicago.

The only thing lower than Nova’s revenue numbers were its audience.  Nova M was, if anything, a more vacuous flop than Air America.

To add insult to injury?  Brian Maloney reports (in the same story linked above) that Randee Rhodes’ “flagship” station, WJON in Palm Beach, has tubed her.

For Sean Hannity.

So long, Nova M.

If a DC liberal pundit tells you you’re paranoid for worrying about your house being robbed, aim your gun at your door; there will be an armed burglar bursting in shortly.

Anytime a liberal pundit, politician, apologist or powerbroker “guarantees” to keep hands off a liberty that might undercut the left in any way, they are lying.  Every time.  There are no exceptions. To the left, civil liberties are not “rights endowed to us by our creator”; they are tools in the political toolbox, to be manipulated to the left’s singular advantage.
For the past year, as conservatives warned that Obama (and/or his followers, and/or his masters in Congress) were aiming towardreimposing the “Fairness” Doctrine, the lefty peanut gallery tittered and tut-tutted; “you’re being paranoid!”, we were assured – ignorant, of course, of the fact that we conservatives have in our institutional memory many examples of the left’s casual outlook on civil liberties issues.

We are right, of course:

[Chris] Wallace asked [Obama minion David Axelrod] about an issue making the rounds on both conservative and liberal radio shows, where Democratic Congressional leaders (and even Bill Clinton) have recently weighed in.”Will you rule out reimposing the Fairness Doctrine?” asked Wallace.

Now, remember; Obama was putatively “crystal-clear” on the subject last summer, when his press flak Michael Ortiz said “Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters.”

Why would there be any need to fudge what was once – as the lefty peanut gallery has pointed out – a clear, definitive statement?

Because Obama is no more about “clearness and definition”, to say nothing of honesty, than he is about “depth”:

“I’m going to leave that issue to Julius Genachowski, our new head of the FCC, to, and the president, to discuss,” Axelrod said. “So I don’t have an answer for you now.”

Um – why not?

The One’s position seemed (we have been assured!) pretty clear before the election.  Why not now?

Lester Kinsolving, the conservative radio host, has twice asked Robert Gibbs about it in the briefing room, and each time, the press secretary didn’t reveal the administration’s position.Last week, I reached out to press office staffers in order to find out if the administration’s position is the same as in June, and have not yet received a response.

This is, unlike many political questions, an utterly black and white issue; “Do you support free speech?”  You do, or you don’t.  Last year – when Obama was trying to suck in reach out to “moderates” –  he saw it as such, as well.  No “Fairness” Doctrine.

Today?

If Obama’s position on the Fairness Doctrine is the same as during the campaign — and I have no reason to believe it isn’t — stating that clearly would quickly silence a lot of conservative critics who assume the Democratic president is going to push to reinstate the defunct policy. Otherwise, the Fairness Doctrine chatter on the airwaves isn’t likely to die down.

I won’t rule out the idea that Obama wants to leave the question open.  Knowing as he does that conservative talk radio is the most focused, effective opposition to his rule right now, and knowing that actually acting to shut it down would tie his Administration downin endless litigation and justifiable accusations of overreach, it might be in The One’s interest to leave this issue out there, to serve as a stalking horse to occupy peoples’ attention.

It’s equally likely that Nancy Pelosi has told The One “jump”, and Obama is still just wondering “off what?”

Joe “Chloe” Bodell at Minnesota Short Bus – a “blog” that hosts 9/11 truther Grace Kelly, the always indignant-to-the-point-of-incontinence anonyblogger “Two Putt Tommy” [blogging motto: “Rage is evidence!”] and Eric “Big” Pusey,  “writes”:

The political media establishment in Washington D.C. is increasingly disconnected from reality.

The sky turned blue tomorrow.