Maybe we'll stay a two newspaper town after all.

The new owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News have worked out what appears, on the surface at least, to be a reasonable and workable deal with the Newspaper Guild.

Say this for Rand Paul...

Despite his virtually incoherent macho babble which revs up the masses and the passes for brilliance among the Libertarian crowd (and will win him a column on the Washington Post editorial pages as a consolation prize if he loses the election), the boy is not afraid to show his feminine side.

I mean, being afraid of being interviewed by David Gregory, who has maintained the Meet the Press tradition so firmly established by Tim Russert--softball questions, especially to Repugnants--without even bothering with the occasional, and usually silly and meaningless, "gotcha" which would send the Villagers' hearts all a-twitter in Timmy's time--being afraid of Equivalency* Dave is about as soft and wimpy as you can get.

*If he can't say "but, on the other hand" every couple of sentences, he's done.

Don't you dare confuse me with facts.

Ted Koppel, interviewed on the BBC:

"I think we're living through the — I hope — the final stages of what I like to call the age of entitlement...We now feel entitled not to have the news that we need but the news that we want. We want to listen to news that comes from those who already sympathize with our particular point of view. We don't want the facts any more."

I think a lot more of the blame ought to cast on the messenger as well--this deplorable state did not develop solely as a result of the public's dragging the the media kicking and screaming to new depths, but it is a pretty accurate summation of the what the public seems to demand today.

The Great Transformation.

Salon's Joan Walsh on the success of GOP/Fox News/Tea Party strategy and constant drum-beating:

It's a shame how our cautious, centrist Ivy League president, who was raised by his white family, who never fails to seek conciliation rather than confrontation, somehow turned out to be a scary black man. I didn't see that one coming.

Not that any of this is racial, of course.

The other side of Obama's "race problem."

Also from Frank Rich's must-read column today:

Last week, after I wrote about the role race plays in some of the apocalyptic right-wing hysteria about the health care bill, a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point. He theorized that race also plays a role in “the often angry and intemperate talk” he has been hearing from “left-liberal friends for the past many months about what a failure and a disappointment” the president has been. In his view, “Obama never said anything, while running, to give anyone the idea” that he was other than a “deliberate, compromise-seeking bipartisan moderate.” My friend wondered if white liberals who voted for Obama expected a “sweeping Republicans-be-damned kind of agenda” in part — and he emphasized “in part!” — because “they expect a black guy to be intemperate, impetuous, impatient” rather than “measured, deliberate, patient.”

The enigma that is Obama.

Frank Rich this morning:

Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela.

Howie's probably not getting any tonight.

Howard Kurtz trotted out three journalism critics on his Sunday morning Reliable Sources CNN snooze-fest today, probably believing that at least one of them would provide protective cover so he could present the current wave of right wing hate speech and threats across the nation as a equivalency issue ("but...but...the Democrats doe it too"), but no such luck. All three slammed the right almost exclusively  and in particular Gov. Quitter. Howie was nonplussed.

It got worse. In a later segment, he interviewed Erick Erickson, the proprietor of Red State, a right wing blog on which he has made several, shall we say, intemperate comments. Erickson is the latest CNN legacy hire, still desperately trying to fill their Glenn Beck void (Erick's nuts, but not Beck nuts, so good luck with that) and, under very gentle questioning basically offered up the defense "I didn't know anybody read me," "I didn't know what I was saying" and/or "I'm all grown up now."

He finally did manage to slip a silly non sequitur in short segment at show's end in which he talked about the Tiger Woods "interviews" that were permitted a few fawning reporters last week. When it was pointed out that they were only five minutes long, Howie went all petulant. "Well, you know, when he talks to network reporters, President Obama sometimes limits the time to five minute too." Apparently, the standards of a disgraced serial adulterer should be measured against those of the Leader of the Free World.

That was the best he could manage, well off his weekly standards. I doubt it's going to be enough to placate wifey, who is a GOP operative and has come to expect a bit more wooing over her morning coffee.

Riding the Tiger.

The Golf world and the TV world are all a-twitter about the return of Tiger Woods for The Masters, which was announced today. CBS expects boffo ratings and golfers expect somebody to pay attention them again.

I hope to hell he wins it.

As I tweeted several weeks back, the moment those uptight southern fossils have to slip their treasured green jacket onto the shoulders of a black, serial adulterer (with white wimmins!) is going to be one to treasure.

Otherwise, you know, "Amen corner," mindless reverence and haughty attitudes....same old, same old in other words.

We ignore reality at our peril.

The comments below are excepts from today's column by Frank Rich in the New York Times.

Rich is often all too facile and in search of the clever phrase or image in lieu of serious commentary, and he will forever be tainted by his part in the smarmy smearing of Al Gore in 2000 (together with colleagues Maureen Dowd, Ceci Connolly & "Stenographer Sue" Schmidt), but he often indicates a solid historical perspective and, from my point of view, he is very much on target today.

We live in very dangerous times and they echo a very bad time in our recent history:

Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

[T]he unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled "patriots" to sow havoc.

[M]ost Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

At [CPAC]'s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as "conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.

"Undo it all -- until America is left with a government appropriate to an isolated, 18th-century farming republic. "

My goodness! Michael Gerson, the former Bush (Dubya) speechwriter who is one of the conservative legacy hires at the Washington Post, appears to have concluded that his right wing brethren know not what they are talking about or proposing.

This is particularly surprising because, back in the day, he sorta thought Teh Stupid was cool.

Heatlh Care Debate captivates nation. And the winner is...

The top of their game is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

In this week''s New Yorker, David Packer uses Old Man Broder's love poem to Sarah Palin following the Tea Party speech ("a public figure at the top of her game") to skewer what passes for journalism among the almost useless Washington Press Corps:

Broder wasn’t analyzing Palin’s positions or accusations, or the truth or falsehood of her claims, or even the nature of the emotions that she appeals to. He was reviewing a performance and giving it the thumbs up, using the familiar terminology of political journalism. This has been so characteristic of the coverage of politics for so long that it doesn’t seem in the least bit odd, and it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way. A couple of weeks ago, the Times ran a piece by its lead political reporter, Adam Nagourney, about a Republican strategy session in Hawaii: “Here in Honolulu, the strains within the party over conservative principles versus political pragmatism played out in a sharp and public way, especially as the party establishment struggled to deal with the demands of the Tea Party movement.” The structure of the sentence, and of the article, puts the emphasis entirely on tactics and performance. This kind of prose goes down as easily and unnoticeably as a glass of sparkling water, with no aftertaste. Readers interested in politics drink quarts of it every day without gaining weight. And Broder and Nagourney are at the top of their game.

The best part of it is when he shows us how one of the villagers* would cover Hamid Karzai in Pakistan.

*The concept of Washington as an insular village in which the inhabitants, especially the press, write mostly for and about themselves and share the same conventional wisdom is an internet meme which provides an easy shortcut for sayin "the chattering class," "TV gasbags" and/or "pompous self-centered asses" all at once.

Today's grumpiest bastards (I love 'em).

Pierce, again, with the best idea for the play-in game for the NCAA basketball tournament (soon to involve everybody so who cares?) I've ever seen and Cole, again, with a perfect in every way detailed outline of the fate any decent, forward-looking legislation would fare in the current congress and how the media would treat. Brilliant.

"The Era of Ozio."

This post by Joe Klein at Swampland the ensuing comments made for interesting and thought-provoking reading for me while washing the taste of Villanova Georgetown out of my mouth with beer (and excuse, you know). Check it out.

Yep, Double Standard.

The inimitable Charles Pierce, in his weekly Friday posting at Eric Alterman's Altercation, reaffirms a point I made in the previous post and pins a bullseye on the sleaziest pair on the contemporary political scene:

John Edwards is pretty far beyond rehabilitation as a public figure at this point, I suppose. (Although why he is, and both Newt Gingrich, who dumped two chronically ill wives because of his own Comely Aide Problem , and John McCain, who dumped his severely injured wife to marry well out in Arizona, are still considered perfectly respectable National Voices, is beyond me.) 

IOIYAR, Charles  (and I like how they expand the definition to include hypocrisy.)

How Good Was He?

Fox News cut away from today's live, mesmerizing dressing-down of the House Repug thugs by President Obama  20 minutes before it was finished, that's how good.

Just guessing they were not at all happy about how he was politely tearing all the standard right wing talking points to shreds and calling individuals out on misrepresentations and lies. Glenn Beck may have been weeping in his dressing room.*

My guess: we will not see this sort of live face-to-face again involving the GOP congressional leadership unless they can have shout-'em-down Tea Party disrupter-types in the crowd.

*Okay, that most likely happens a couple of times week 

"Act Like a Lady."

Everybody got their panties in a bunch when crotchety old Arlen Specter said that to fatuous not-as-old Michelle Bachmann on the radio.

Hey, ever since he switched parties, Darlin' Arlen must have noticed that it's actually the way the whole damned Democratic Party, from the White House on down, acts as a matter of course while the Repugs walk all over 'em.

Poor old fella just got confused.

Best Sarah-Palin-Joins-Fox-News Comment.

David Letterman: New Fox slogan, Hair and Unbalanced.

He also had a great Top Ten list, which you can see here.

Wonder what the odds are on how soon she resigns?

Is Dick Cheney Being a Dick Because He's Insane or Senile or What?

Dunno the answer, but Tom Tomorrow skewers the ex-vice president from hell right good in this panel from this week's cartoon.

So much of what Dubya's (Not So) Secret Master has to say these days is so far out of touch with reality that only aged tea-bagger, anybody with a show on Fox News, Matt Drudge or an Unemployed Alaskan could take him seriously.

Granted that pretty much sums up the current GOP base, it still means that the dreaded Mainstream Liberal Press has to be really struggling to pretend to treat him seriously.

I do think they're doing a helluva job with that. Who knew they could be so clever.

Of course, there is an alternative explanation...

This Is Absolutely Astonishing...and Arrogant.

 Can you imagine the outraged screams from the outraged screamers which would result if a Buddhist suggested this to a Christian on a national TV show?

That thing it says up at the top of the page there, about "living in a post-rational world?"

I think, were I to do it over again, I might replace "post" with "anti."