Notes on Politics: With the First REAL GOP Debate, Election 2012 Kicks Off

In my house, the first well attended Republican debate on CNN got short shrift because we were all watching the Boston Bruins playoff game, though I watched highlights of the debate later. (It did indeed pain this political junkie to miss watching the debate live.)

Didn't think this was CNN's John King's most shining moment, but with the debate I think we can safely say that the 2012 presidential election is finally under way. Which of course means that The Daily Show's Jon Stewart has to take aim and satirize the crap out of it. And man, did he have some fat targets. This is going to be one weird election.

Notes on Politics: Jon Stewart, Anthony Weiner & Bill Clinton; Plus Local News on Decline

'The Wangover’

How is it possible to laugh at this sad, sad Weinter-Gate situation that's so patently and bizarrely insane?

Watch The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart take a stab at what his staff is calling, “The Wangover,” and place the hullabaloo into its surreal context. (Note: Stewart was once a quasi-roommate of Rep. Anthony Weiner's, actually Stewart shared an apartment with Weiner’s then-girlfriend.)

Measly Local News Coverage = More Gov’t Power, Potential Abuses

On a more serious note . . . When I was but a mere cub newspaper reporter and was assigned to cover a small town, I was given this advice: Get to know the people who work in the various departments in the town, particularly the administrative assistants, back then called secretaries. So I routinely checked in with departments and chatted folks up. I made sure to find out what happened at all the public meetings the boards/departments had if I hadn’t been able to attend them in person. In essence, I covered any given town to which I had been assigned, like the proverbial blanket.

That’s no longer the case for newspaper reporters as their staffs shrink and resources are pulled away from local newsgathering. Plus, many local newspapers have shied away from having their reporters write stories about government meetings because they don’t think it makes for interesting reading in a hyper-competitive, 24/7 media landscape.

The result? People don’t necessarily know what the heck is going on inside Town Hall any more. Local elections get barely any coverage and information about candidates for elected offices is sparse while local newspapers’ space for news stories contracts. We, the voters, are left largely in the dark as to what our local elected officials are doing. Think about what happened in the city of Bell, California where, until a Los Angeles Times story last year, its city officials were receiving oversized salaries, like $100,000/year for part-time City Council positions and nearly $800,000 for the city manager. And this was in “one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County,” the Times reported. If a local news reporter had been covering that city on a regular basis -- scouring proposed municipal budgets and attending budget hearings like reporters used to do -- the public outrage about what officials were proposing would've likely prevented those salaries from being approved in the first place.

Which brings us to a new study from the Federal Communications Commission which found, “Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged,” the New York Times reported.
The paper quoted the study’s author as saying, “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism – going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy – is in some cases at risk at the local level.” The FCC report cited the Bell, California case as an example of what happens when regular local reporting is cut.

I heartily concur that the dearth of local reporting will result in an ill-informed electorate and unchecked government power. Maybe folks like a local blogger I know -- who covers her hometown much more thoroughly and in depth than the local newspapers -- will step in and do the job that trained journalists used to do: Providing updates on what’s transpiring at Town Hall.

Notes on Pop Culture & Politics: Stewart Questions Libyan Intervention, Liz Taylor's Best Films & New 'Mad Men' Season Delayed

Jon Stewart Takes on U.S. Action in Libya

After taking a week’s break from broadcasting, Jon Stewart stormed back to The Daily Show this week and quipped incredulously, “When we left [the air] the world’s two biggest trouble spots were Wisconsin and the set of Two and a Half Men.”

Not only did he question why, when we’re already engaged in two wars, we’ve now added a third skirmish to our slate of military responsibilities, Stewart asked, “Aren’t we also out of money? . . . You can’t simultaneously fire teachers and Tomahawk missiles.” Wonder what's going to have to be cut from the federal budget in order to fund the United States' role in enforcing the Libyan No Fly Zone? Or how much taxes will have to be raised.

Another interesting question which I heard on Morning Joe yesterday: If the United States is going to act as though we're the world's police force, why are we only selectively walking the beat? A commentator asked why the United States is getting militarily involved in Libya on behalf of protecting innocent civilians who want to live freely but didn't with Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, etc.?


Image credit: Boston Globe

What Were Liz Taylor’s Best Films?

Learning that Elizabeth Taylor has died of congestive heart failure and seeing those photos of her in her heyday cropping up on sites all over the web, when she was – get ready for this cliché which you’re going to hear a bazillion times over the course of the week – “the Angelina Jolie of her day,” has sparked my desire to watch a few Taylor flicks. But which ones?



Calling Liz Taylor aficionados: Which were her best films? Which ones would you recommend that I see?

New Mad Men Season to be Delayed

Seriously people? I mean really . . . how long do you expect Mad Men fans to patiently wait and drum our fingers atop our desks while the folks at AMC, Lionsgate and show creator/runner Matt Weiner debate the terms of the award winning show’s return?

Mad Men’s very first episode aired in early July 2007, I remember seeing its premiere because I was on vacation at Cape Cod the time and stumbled upon an ad for it while watching The Godfather on AMC and decided to give it a try.

Now, according to an article in today’s New York Times, we learned that the show may not return to liven up the vast wasteland that typically is summer TV. We may have to wait until 2012:

“In the meantime Mad Men actors like John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling, are in a bind, expecting that they will be called back to work but unsure when that call will come. While walking the red carpet at a premiere of his new film, The Adjustment Bureau, last month, Mr. Slattery remarked to reporters, ‘I’m looking for a job.’”

Image credits: Boston Globe, AMC.

Processing the Tucson/Giffords Shooting

We all want answers but answers might be hard to come by after a reportedly mentally disturbed 22-year-old opened fire this weekend on a public gathering featuring a U.S. Congresswoman and her constituents outside of a grocery store in Tucson.

We all want it to be easy to be able to point to someone, or a group of people, and say, “There! She’s responsible! She’s the reason why this happened!” or “They did it! Their inflammatory signs made the shooter snap!” or “His parents! They must've been bad!”

But sometimes the uncomfortable fact is that there are no answers because there are unstable people who live in this world who will, one way or another, try to hurt others. And as far as the shooter in Tucson, we might not know for some time whether anything could have been legally or morally done to prevent what happened on Saturday. As we get more information, maybe that question will be addressed more comprehensively. We'll have to wait and see on that front.

In the meantime, it’s sickening to see that the folks who reside on the outer left and right fringes of the political spectrum have their index fingers poised in the pointing position and are blaming the people who hold the polar opposite political beliefs than them for the actions of a mentally unstable individual.

When I was at my daughter’s basketball game on Saturday I was keeping close tabs on the breaking news via Twitter about Rep. Gabby Giffords and the folks who came to see her who police said were gunned down by Jared Loughner. And as news reports were flooding in – many of them containing erroneous information – the blaming started right there on Twitter. It was Sarah Palin’s fault. It was the Tea Partiers. It was talk radio. It was Snooki. (Just kidding, no one blamed Snooki, at least for this incident.) They didn’t wait to see what information we learned about the shooter and his background and whether, in fact, his motivation could be discerned at all. They just impulsively blamed their political foes.

Then the folks on the right got angry and said there was no evidence that the shooter was one of them. Then the finger pointing was returned and the likes of Keith Olbermann and left-leaning bloggers were blamed for THEIR angry words.

Enough.

Seriously.

I hate watching people try to score political points while a set of parents is burying their 9-year-old daughter who went to visit her congresswoman at an event at grocery store and would up being murdered, and while a congresswoman had parts of her skull removed so the swelling in her brain, through which the bullet traveled, won't cause more damage. This is not the time to try to "score" political points.

So when I read David Brooks’ column in the New York Times this morning, I finally found something with which I could agree:

“These accusations – that political actors, contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl – are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.


. . . [T]he political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.”

Brooks seems to share a similar view on how this whole thing has played out as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, he of the famous “Rally for Sanity,” of which we could use a whole lot more. (See his commentary above.) I especially loved the part where Stewart said in his monologue:

“We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine, and by the way that is coming from somebody who truly hates our political environment. It is toxic. It is unproductive but to say that that is what has caused this . . . that I just don’t think you can do.”

I too want to see more political moderation, want to see the end of the political tactic of transforming and dehumanizing those who don’t believe what you believe into enemies who hate America, ascribing to them all manner of evil (which is why something like a No Labels movement appeals to me). But that’s a discussion for another day. Not today.

I think it’s a sad state of affairs when some of the most sane commentary we’re heard can be found on Comedy Central.

Notes on Pop Culture: Hamm on Lackluster 'SNL,' Stewart's Rally for the Sane Middle, 'Grey's' Goes Documentary-Style

Jon Hamm Does His Best with Lackluster SNL Skits

The faux Back to the Future screen tests and the YouTube victim skits were moderately amusing but other than those sketches, the Saturday Night Live writers sure let the earnest Jon Hamm down with the material they gave him. Hamm did a great Robin Williams impression and his best with the Auto-Tune crying bit, (which, incidentally made me think of the folks who put crying Don Draper images into all different scenes, like BuzzFeed’s “Things That Make Don Draper Cry” post and the web site devoted to “Sad Don Draper”) 

But overall, I was left wondering what is going on there at SNL and why so many of the sketches have been falling flat lately. They’ve certainly been proving the truth in the adage: “Comedy is hard.” There’s a reason why Modern Family is such a gem; it’s reliably funny.


Those of you who caught SNL this weekend care to weigh in?



Stewart's Rally for Sanity & Promoting the Middle

Let’s not mince words: The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart leans toward the liberal side of things, but he’s unafraid to call both sides of the political aisle to task for being idiotic, close-minded or full of vapid talking points. (See his pointed interview with President Obama last week, in which he called the president "dude.")

But that being said, his satirical rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend was but one more step in Stewart’s long-running campaign against the promotion of explicitly partisan, divisive, shouting verbiage on cable TV, initially commenced with his broadside against the CNN political talk show Crossfire in 2004 when he asked, “Why do we have to fight?” Stewart proceeded to skewer the show -- as well as shows like it -- in front of its gobsmacked hosts, saying, “Stop hurting America.” Some folks actually credited Stewart’s appearance that night with killing Crossfire.

Notes on Politics: 'The View' Walkout, Oprah Hearts Jon Stewart & Campaigning While Female

The View Walkout

Today I've found myself thinking about a famous quote from comedian Phyllis Diller: “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”

I feel the same way about political discourse which, on far too many occasions, devolves into mean-spirited name calling, especially in the internet era. What would improve matters? If someone doesn’t agree with what someone else is saying, responds by making a rational, strong counter-arguments bolstered by evidence. If there’s common ground onto which both sides can stand side-by-side, great, if not, the two people could agree to disagree. (Of course you need two rational people to do this, folks who aren’t calling one another names and who are willing to engage intellectually.)

So when I heard about the dust-up between Bill O’Reilly and some panelists from The View over the controversial proposed mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, I was greatly disappointed to learn that Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar stormed off the stage after becoming enraged by what O’Reilly had to say. It was heartening to see Barbara Walters respond by making the sage declaration, “We should be able to have discussions without washing our hands and screaming and walking off stage.”

People are taking sides on this, about whether Goldberg and Behar were right to leave the stage or whether their behavior was ridiculous. What say you?



Oprah Hearts Jon Stewart

Certainly you’ve all heard about the satirical rallies The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are planning in Washington to mock the extremism that’s been permeating both ends of the political spectrum these days. Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” will face off against Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive” and both were in the news this week after Oprah bestowed upon them her golden touch by offering Stewart’s studio audience transportation to the rally.

Colbert’s response to Oprah favoring Stewart? Not storming off the stage in a huff:



Campaigning While Female

Female candidates running for office this season continue to fend off attacks which appear to be directed at them because of their gender, not because of their stances on public policies.



Over in California, the candidates for governor debated the comments made by an associate of Jerry Brown’s in which said associate called opponent Meg Whitman a “whore.” Twice.

After moderator Tom Brokaw asked Brown about this, Brown gave a half-hearted apology to Whitman, the kind which goes like this: I’m sorry someone got caught calling you, specifically, a whore, but someone from your campaign said members of Congress are whores too, so there. Whenever one's apology is followed by the word “but,” that oftentimes negates the sincerity of the apology. Plus there’s a big difference between singling out one person and lobbing an insult at her -- like “liar,” “crook” or “whore” -- and making a general criticism of a large group of people, like members of Congress. That being said, it would’ve been prudent for Whitman to have at least said that no one should be tossing around words like “whore” in the context of a political campaign.

UPDATE: It was with disgust that I read that the president of the California chapter of NOW told the political blog Talking Points Memo: "Meg Whitman could be described as 'a political whore.' Yes, that's an accurate statement." And people wonder why many folks dismiss the likes of NOW as a liberal/Democratic organization that only supports fellow liberal/Democrats while feeding conservative and/or Republican women to the wolves. So much for the sisterhood.



Meanwhile, a female congressional candidate in Virginia is being haunted by racy photos taken of her at a costume party six years ago when she was 22 and a recent college graduate, which were posted online in an attempt to embarrass and discredit her.

The candidate, Krystal Ball, who cited Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton as political inspirations, told Fox News:

“The tactic of painting successful women, successful politicians as a whore, it’s nothing new. Ask Sarah Palin, ask Meg Whitman, ask Nikki Haley, Christine O’Donnell. Lots of women face this same thing. And so I decided, although I wanted to just sort of hide in a corner and cry, that I couldn’t let these tactics succeed.”

Notes on Politics: Jon Stewart Sharply Critical of Senate Goldman Sachs Hearing

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Goldman Sachs execs at a Senate hearing. Expletives and questionable nicknames.

Watch.

Discuss.



Oh, and be sure to check out the in-your-face front page of the New York Post today. Few people seem to be mincing words on this story.

'Modern Family' Promo More Entertaining Than Oscars

Loved that The Hurt Locker won best picture. Found it refreshing and inspiring to see Academy Award winning director Kathryne Bigelow holding two awards, breaking Oscar's glass ceiling. Found myself cheering when I heard that a fellow journalist got an Oscar for penning the Oscar winning Hurt Locker screenplay. Eyes teared up when I watched the films of my high school years featured during an Academy homage to the late John Hughes.

But all in all, I was not a fan of the 82nd Academy Awards. As much as I like Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin -- Baldwin simply owns 30 Rock -- I found their performance last night to be just so-so. Only about a quarter of their jokes were amusing and their opening monologue (or is it duo-logue) dragged. Comparing the Oscars to the Golden Globe broadcast, I think Ricky Gervais was much more entertaining and cutting edge . . . because I hear that the Academy Awards folks were all into getting them there youngsters to tune in, what with them recruiting the Twilight stars (sans R.Pat.), Zac Efron's hair and the slouching teen known as Miley Cyrus to present awards. If you're reading, Oscar show people: I want Jon Stewart back.

And while, in theory, I like the personal touch of having someone who actually knows the men and women nominated in the best actor/actress categories say something specific about each nominee, by the time we got to that point in the show, it was annoying and it made a long show (ditch the dance number, this is not the Tony Awards!) even longer.

By the way, was anyone else, other than yours truly, confused by the weirdness that was the documentary short acceptance speech where one guy was speaking when a "Lady Kanye," as she's being referred to online, hijacked the mic? Well Salon got to the bottom of that and found out that there was indeed prior conflict over who was going to accept the Oscar in the event of a win because there was behind-the-scenes acrimony. Oh, the cut-throat world of documentary shorts.

I'm ashamed to say that I actually fell asleep and missed the last few big awards. That's what I get for failing to caffeine up. It was the Oscars, for God's sake, I should've known better than to go into it caffeine free. And when I went to watch the rest of the show on DVR, it cut off mid-way through Sandra Bullock's entertainting acceptance speech because the show went beyond the scheduled 11:30 p.m. ending. (Damn Helen Mirren. I knew I should've extended the taping time!) So I had to go to the Oscar web site and watch the remaining acceptance speeches there.

The most amusing thing I saw all night? The Modern Family promo where the characters had a movie-themed night of charades.



What'd you think of the Oscars, both the winners/losers and the show itself?

Notes on Politics: Putting Olbermann in His Place with Mockery

Two Jon Stewart videos in one week . . . unheard of for this web site. But when there's so much news, particularly of the political type, Stewart generally comes through. I can only hope Saturday Night Live is half as good this weekend. This week has been so packed with great political material, SNL HAS to be good, right?

Anyway, back to Stewart . . . earlier this week, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann launched a vicious verbal attack against GOP U.S. Senate candidate Scott Brown. When people complained, he came back the next night and added more fuel to the fire. Last night, Stewart ripped into Olbermann:



While I liked Stewart's bit, I still think that Ben Affleck's SNL parody was better:

Jon Stewart Skewers Democrats, Mass. Senate Race

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart is ticked . . . totally ticked, angry, really, with the Democrats for bungling the Massachusetts race for U.S. Senate, a race that was, just a month ago, purported to be a lock for the Democratic candidate.

Noting that the president on Sunday injected himself (and by extension the fate of the health care bill) into the race which is perceived to be going down in flames for the Democrats, the left-leaning Stewart went ballistic last night and asked how "a naked guy who drives a truck" could be poised to win the seat formerly held by Senator Ted Kennedy, adding, "It's not that the Democrats are playing checkers and the Republicans are playing chess, it's that the Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurse's office because once again they glued their balls to their thighs."

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Jon Stewart Rips US Intelligence Community a New One

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Terror 2.0 by Yemen
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Jon Stewart used the opening minutes of his first 2010 episode of The Daily Show to eviscerate the U.S. intelligence community for failing to stop the guy with the "Doomsday underpants" who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas day.

As he detailed the information that various intelligence officials had in hand prior to the alleged underpants bomber setting foot on the plane, Stewart was incredulous, particularly about the fact that the alleged bomber's father went to U.S. authorities to warn them that his son had become radicalized and posed a security threat.

"I too have a tendency to ignore messages from Nigerian bankers who wish to help me," Stewart quipped, "but when they show up in person and aren’t asking for a money order but instead turning in their own son maybe that conversation doesn’t get filed under 'spam.'”

Saying that the one-way, paid-with-cash plane ticket coupled with no checked luggage should've been an obvious "hey dudes pull me out of line" clue to security officials, Stewart added, "It’s December, he’s going from Nigeria to Amsterdam to Detriot without a coat? With a one-way ticket? Do you think he’s going to Detroit to start a better life? What do you think he’s going there because he thinks there are lots of jobs?"

To illustrate the horrific absurdity of the situation, Stewart used an action figure to dramatize how not much has changed in the eight years since a man -- who also had a one-way ticket paid for with cash and checked no luggage -- used the same type of explosives as the Christmas day underwear bomber, only the explosives were moved up from the shoes to the underwear.

When I read that officials apparently think that the answer to underwear and shoe bombers is to take quasi-naked images of airline passengers and make everyone sit in their seats for the last hour of a flight, I know I feel super-safe. Not.

Where's Jack Bauer when you need him?

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Hillary Clinton Tells Off Questioner, Dances, Plus Testy Health Care Town Mtgs

Hillary Clinton Tells Off Congo Questioner

Me thinks that our secretary of state must've been on the receiving end of a whole mess o'sexist commentary thus far in her tenure, and constantly feel one-upped by her suck-all-the-oxygen-out-of-the-room spouse who got international accolades for helping to negotiate with the North Koreans for the freedom for two U.S. journalists last week. That's the only explanation I have (except maybe sleep deprivation) for Hillary Clinton ditching her normally professionally cool responses to difficult questions and telling a college student from Congo, in a matter of speaking, that she didn't like her question. One problem: The questioner didn't intend to insult Hillary Clinton. The translator screwed up. Whoops.



Hillary Dance Party

I always feel badly for U.S. officials when they venture abroad, play along with local customs and show courtesy to their hosts. How many presidents have donned un-western-like clothing and gotten mocked for wearing the duds by the folks back home?

So when an international host invites you to dance, what are you supposed to say, "No thank you. The late night comedians and folks on the internet will torture me about my dancing. Forever. I'll pass."

Of course not. You dance. And then be a good sport and suffer through the ridicule. Like Hillary Clinton has to at the hands of Conan O'Brien's staff about her dancing during her trip to Africa:



Testy Health Care Town Meetings

The recent spate of health care/health insurance town meetings between congressmen and senators and their constituents have gotten fairly heated haven't they? Some have devolved into circuses where no one gets heard and no one communicates and it all becomes white noise as tempers flare.

As I've watched this unfold, I've seen two sides getting fired up and becoming unable or unwilling to actually listen to the concerns of the other side, with the exception of Barack Obama himself, who seems game to field and handle pointed questions without shutting people down. (However people haven't been as nasty to him personally as they have been to U.S. congressmen and senators.)

The pro-Obama administration folks have tended to parrot the president's lines, like the ones spoken today at Obama's town meeting in New Hampshire: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan." Obama said he doesn't want government bureaucrats OR insurance company bureaucrats "meddling" and getting involved in medical decisions made between you and your doctor. He said there won't be "death panels" run by the government to decide if a frail or sick senior should be provided health care. Obama has repeatedly told the story of his mother spending the last weeks of her life fighting with the health insurance company over her cancer treatments. He's also fond of saying, "No one in America should go broke because they got sick." The White House has created a web site which officials said seeks to clarify some of the misinformation voters have been given about the various health care reform bills. (Full disclosure: I haven't read the health care reform bills, though I think I might and then post what I find.)

All of those things seem to be common points of interest on which both conservatives and liberals could, essentially, agree. Keep all bureaucrats out of medical decisions. Pick your own health plan and your doctor. You shouldn't be driven into bankruptcy if someone in your family is sick. All good.

However there's a divergence from all of those common points when it comes down to actual legislation. People, many of them conservative-leaning, have been doing some research into the bills and have become nervous. They fear panels of government officials making decisions related to their health. (I imagine someone from my state's notoriously unfriendly Registry of Motor Vehicles handling my or my children's health claims and I shudder.) They don't want a single, government-run health care plan, which Sen. Arlen Specter today said he'll consider as senators discuss competing pieces of health insurance legislation. People are justifiably leery about how much this is going to cost, particularly during a recession.

Then, at town meetings across the country where there have been people posing well reasoned questions about the plans, there've also been screaming nutcases. The media give a lot of the coverage to the nutcases and eventually everyone who questions the plan is lumped under the category of an unruly mob. It's at this point when we realize that when it comes to health care and making life-and-death decisions, people take things very personally.

Democratic proponents of the health care overhaul haven't made things better by labeling the voters who are getting riled up at town meetings "un-American," like several of the people at Senator Specter's meeting with constituents today. There's a way to express your skepticism, disapproval and ask tough questions without being a jack ass.

Having partisans like Ann Coulter and James Carville chattering on Good Morning America about these emotional town halls certainly doesn't help bestow calm or promote rational discussion. But rational discussion can be quite boring, mind-numbing at times, and doesn't make for good TV which thrives on drama and conflict. I'd love to see leaders from both sides of the aisle, step up and seek the calm, boring middle ground here, tamp down the fury and the name calling and bore us all to death with reasonable and open discussions. For as long as it takes, without rushing. But I guess that's just too much to ask for.

Or we could just call Jon Stewart for his read on the situation. While he is a liberal, he's funny.

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Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Jon Stewart's Advice to SC Governor

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

There's a reason that's a cliche Governor Sanford. And, as a married father of four boys, it's one you should've heeded some time ago before your name evoked tsking and dark humor from coast to coast.

First you disappeared and the cable news networks became like animated milk cartons, bearing your likeness, age and the location where you were last seen. There were reports from your office saying you were hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Then, lo and behold, when a reporter found you at an Atlanta airport and you lied about what you'd been doing. Eventually the world learned that you'd been in Argentina to visit your lover.

At this point, it would've been wise to be quiet.

But you didn't. You gave a teary press conference. E-mails exchanged between you and your lover emerged. Amid the chaos, you then agreed to give an AP interview this week where you talked about "almost" crossing the line with other women and how your lover is a "soul mate." News stories have been published saying that you visited your girlfriend more times than you initially admitted.

If Sanford, once considered a potential GOP presidential candidate, has any political advis0rs left, my best guess is that they're headed for Wasilla where their job would seem easy by comparison.

Jon Stewart, among other commentators, had an amusing take on Sanford's inability to keep his mouth shut.

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Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Iranians Protesting Election Results

The events which are unfolding in the wake of the disputed Iranian presidential election are being documented by a multitude of web sites, from streams of tweets from Twitter, videos from YouTube and stories from news organizations which are struggling to adhere to the recent Iranian crackdowns on the media's transmission of video from the streets. It is, in a word, stunning.

I've been watching coverage of the five days' worth of election protests on cable news, on video feeds from news web sites and have read stories from newspapers, as well as tweets from Iran. Several things about this historic struggle to grab hold of democracy -- and a vote tally that actually bears a resemblance to an accurate count of the ballots -- struck me:

Silent Protest

Imagine people walking through the streets -- thousands and thousand of them -- there to protest an election they believe has been taken from them. And they walk in silence, holding their hands up in the peace sign, trying not to raise the ire of government riot police with whom some protesters have violently clashed over recent days. The video below captured the silent protest:



Years Ending in "9"

While reading a column in the Boston Globe by Jeff Jacoby today -- which compared the reaction of President Obama to the unrest in Iran, to President George H. W. Bush's muted response to the democratic protests in China 20 years ago ("In reacting to the recent Iranian election and to the protests that erupted after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the runaway victor, the Obama White House seems to be taking a page from the elder Bush's 1989 playbook.") -- I found it oddly intriguing that the Chinese uprising was in 1989 and the previous unrest in Iran occurred in 1979.

"The Revolution Had Begun."

The Boston Globe has on its web site a dispatch from Tehran from a participant of one of the large protests. It's riveting reading:

". . . [T]he crowd did not consist of young men, but housewives, seniors, businessmen wearing suits, even children. There was blood on many of them. They were walking downhill towards the Interior Ministry, determined and in force. The wave that had taken over Iran and partied in the streets into the morning for the last few weeks was now an army on the move. As I stood in place trying to figure out what I was seeing, I noticed shopkeepers shutting down and joining the flock. People were also chanting on the sidelines, 'down with the dictator,' referring to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, while the crowd chanted 'join us proud Iranians, join us, join us.' The crowd was growing by the moment."

The Daily Show Goes to Iran

Further blurring the lines between news, entertainment and journalism, Comedy Central's The Daily Show is sending the same guy who cut the New York Times to shreds last week, to Iran in a series of reports called, "Access of Evil."

Jon Stewart had a brutal take on how CNN has been covering the breaking news in Iran, given the restrictions placed on American journalists by the Iranian government. Mocking their reliance on "unverified material," Stewart also skewered the Iranian government's election tallying techniques.

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Irandecision 2009 - CNN's Unverified Material
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Image credit: Getty images via the Huffington Post.

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: All Media Smackdown Edition, NYT/Daily Show, Stewart/Scarborough, Letterman/Palin

NYT Gets Slammed on Daily Show

Did the New York Times staffers who agreed to participate in a recent Daily Show segment about the future of the dying newspaper industry realize that the Daily Show is all about SATIRE? Did they not expect wacky questions? Sharp hey-dude-you're-so-toast darts to be thrown their way?

It doesn't appear as though those thoughts crossed their minds when they decided to partake in the piece. Judge for yourself by watching the segment below, a scathing portrait of out-of-touch editors, though Executive Editor Bill Keller's comment about how the Huffington Post can't and doesn't have bureaus in far-flung and dangerous locales because it doesn't have the money to do so was interesting, but only to a limited degree because you know what, the NYT shouldn't be bragging about having more money than anyone else right now, particularly when they're threatening to shutter the Boston Globe (which already eliminated a lot of its foreign bureaus because of costs) because of red ink. That last joke, about what's black and white and red all over: Killer. (Link to the video here):

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End Times
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Stewart and Scarborough Go Mano-a-Mano . . . Through Their TV Shows

I've been monitoring this (manufactured?) controversy between the Daily Show's Jon Stewart and Morning Joe's Joe Scarborough. (For the record, I'm a fan of both guys and their shows.) In a nutshell, Morning Joe recently decided to team up with Starbucks as a sponsor, seeing as though the anchors, Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are conspicuous consumers of Starbucks products during their news casts. This made them big, fat, irresistible targets for spoofing. Cue: Stewart. This resulted in the anchors going back and forth was various and sundry sniping.

Yesterday, in discussing Stewart, Scarborough called him an angry man and suggested he had a Napoleon complex. Stewart responded last night by calling Scarborough "watered down and stupid" and then did a skit which I'd venture to say was funnier in the writers' room than in its execution. Stewart brought out all manner of faux-branded coffee products -- like a box of "Taster's Choice" tissues -- had mascara running down his face while he pretended to cry, fled the stage, asking for his Napoleon hat and coat as he climbed on top of a small horse. When he was "talked back" into returning to the stage, he did so shouting, "Rage on! Rage on!" (Link to the video here.)

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Did Letterman Go Too Far?

That's the question du jour regarding Letterman's jokes about Sarah Palin's recent appearance at a New York Yankees game, where she brought her 14-year-old daughter along with her. Letterman made jokes about a Palin daughter, including about A-Rod knocking up a Palin daughter during the game, and about keeping a Palin daughter away from disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Why do I keep saying, "a Palin daughter?" Because the 14-year-old daughter was the one in New York at the game with her mom but, apparently, Letterman thought it was the 18-year-old daughter who recently had a baby, the one who was on the cover of People Magazine with her infant. Last night, Letterman explicitly said that he wasn't talking about the 14-year-old. He said he was talking about the 18-year-old. But that's not exactly how it came across when he told the jokes.

Palin got ticked. Told him off indirectly by spouting off to journalists and issuing a statement, which resulted in Letterman issuing a caustic clarification last night which, I guess in a comedian's world, constitutes an apology of some sort. During Morning Joe this morning and later on The View, the question was raised by Brzezinski and by Elisabeth Hasselbeck as to whether Letterman would've gone after Palin's teenaged kids if she were a Democrat instead of a very conservative Republican. Barbara Walters added during The View's discussion that politicians' children should be off the table as far as lampooning goes, unlike panelist Joy Behar who said that because the Palins "traipsed" her pregnant daughter out in public, the family deserves what it gets. (See The View debate here.)



UPDATE: While listening to various folks discuss the Letterman/Palin situation this afternoon, I heard a local radio commentator make an interesting analogy: Invoking the suspension of MSNBC's David Shuster in 2008 after he suggested that twentysomething Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out" by her mother as she went out on the campaign trail talking up Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, the commentator asked why Shuster was suspended for making a comment about an adult and used the words "I apologize," while some folks are brushing off Letterman's comments about a 14-year-old daughter of a Republican vice presidential nominee.

'Daily Show' Massacre: Jon Stewart as a New Brand of Media Critic

It was so brutal last night, when Jon Stewart absolutely destroyed CNBC's Jim Cramer's will to live during his Daily Show interview that I almost felt badly for Cramer. Thought he'd burst into tears at any moment. He was reduced to a quivering shell. (The first part of the three-part interview is below, link here.)

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Several interview post-mortems have called Stewart a new kind of fearless media critic who's doing the work that the "real" journalists won't do, which is holding pundits accountable for what they say on the air and for the impact of those words on others. In the case of the CNBC analysts (Cramer, et al), Stewart's point was that when they urge people to "Buy! Buy! Buy!" stocks in certain companies, people listen because CNBC bills itself as the place for insightful business news from experts in the field. But when their prognostications go awry, the commentators don't own the responsibility for their words . . . until Stewart skewers them, as was Cramer's case last night. THEN they finally admit that mistakes were made.

The Atlantic's James Fallows, author of a fantastic book on the media called Breaking the News, likened Stewart's interview with Cramer to interviews by the ground-breaking Edward R. Murrow, noting, "I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud."

The New York Times' media reporter Brian Stelter observed: "Mr. Stewart questioned Mr. Cramer about the perception that CNBC acts as a cheerleader for the investment community. 'The financial news industry is not just guilty of a sin of omission but a sin of commission,' Mr. Stewart said. Mr. Cramer agreed that he made a number of faulty predictions over the years."

The Associated Press described Stewart as "hammering" Cramer and telling the commentator that the fall-out from his and his colleagues' bad predictions was no joke. AP reported:

"Stewart said he and Cramer are both snake-oil salesmen, only The Daily Show is labeled as such. He claimed CNBC shirked its journalistic duty by believing corporate lies, rather than being an investigative 'powerful tool of illumination.' And he alleged CNBC was ultimately in bed with the businesses it covered -- that regular people's stocks and 401Ks were 'capitalizing your adventure.'"

This interview harkened back to Stewart's obliteration of CNN's Crossfire in 2004 where the comedian called the political pundits on the carpet for contributing nothing but negativism and bile to our national political discussions and asked them to just "stop." He was as ruthless then as he was last night. (FYI: The quality of the video below isn't great.)



I'm a regular viewer of political chat shows. Morning Joe. This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Fox News Sunday. Meet the Press (a shell of its former self from the Russert years). Hardball with Chris Matthews. But this particular interview, aired on COMEDY Central, was one of the toughest and on-the-money interviews I've seen in some time, even tougher than Katie Couric's Sarah Palin piece. When I turned off my TV last night, I was still stunned by what I'd witnessed.

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: 'Tis Gettin' Ugly in Cable TV Newsland, NBC vs Stewart

Let me first say this: I'm a big fan of Morning Joe. Love the camaraderie between Joe and Mika. Love the in-depth political conversations in which they engage that sometimes sound like discussions you might overhear in a bar at 12:20 in the morning. I'm a bigggg fan.

Last week, I laughed my fanny off at Jon Stewart's lambasting of CNBC -- Rick Santelli in particular -- for what Stewart saw as aggressive market cheerleading, urging people to buy stocks from companies that, not too long after the buy recommendations were made, collapsed.

When I heard Joe Scarborough yesterday morning talking about Stewart with CNBC's Jim Cramer (Joe felt Stewart was unfairly targeting his CNBC colleagues and cherry-picking prognostications just to make them look foolish), I knew it would get ugly. Cramer, who also appeared on the Today Show that morning, wasn't pleased with Stewart either.

Which, of course, only prodded Stewart to attack anew, and brilliantly, I might add, particularly the part at the end of the segment below (link here) where he had Dora the Explorer weighed in on the war between cable network personalities while Dora's pet monkey Boots offered to throw feces at Joe and Cramer.

Tangential question: Why is Jon Stewart doing the job that the news media should be doing?

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Basic Cable Personality Clash Skirmish '09

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Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Puppies, Kittens & Jim Cramer

The Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert lampooned professional media prognosticators -- the same ones skewered by Jon Stewart -- who've been aggressively advising President Barack Obama to be more positive about our dour economic situation, despite the negative Dow numbers and layoff notices.

So Colbert interviewed CNBC's Jim Cramer (who was smacked around in Stewart's 8-minute anti-CNBC barrage on The Daily Show) while images of puppies and kittens ran behind Cramer's head. Colbert said the footage -- puppies frolicking in a meadow, with giant bows around their necks -- would make people feel more "comfortable" and possibly stop shoving all their money under their mattresses.

I couldn't stop laughing. (Link to the video here.)

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Market Psychology - Jim Cramer

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Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Jon Stewart Deftly Destroys CNBC, Including Santelli

I, like, the rest of the informed citizenry, have been greatly distressed about the economic news as of late. It's so dire and bleak. It seems as though a huge black hole has opened up and all these solid American companies (or companies we thought were solid and would be around forever, like Ford), are hurtling into it . . . that's when those companies aren't being thrown lifelines worth trillions of dollars in taxpayer money with no guarantee that the money will stave off further disaster. (The New York Times breaks down the sordid amounts here.)

Even the normally optimistic Brian Williams is so down in the dumps these days that at the end of his NBC Nightly News broadcast last night, he put out a call for viewers to send in feel good stories about folks who are doing good things for others so that he could report on something positive for a change.

Yes, it's gotten that bad.

Columns like Maureen Dowd's yesterday, detailing the obscene pork (8,000+ items including funds for "pig odor research," "catfish genetics research" and a tattoo removal program for gang members) in the proposed federal budget -- pork which Senator Obama said he'd eliminate when he was campaigning for president, but now that he's the Commander in Chief, he and his people are saying that the pork in this proposed budget is President Bush's fault, not his -- just make things feel hopeless.

Then I saw Jon Stewart. Thank God for Jon Stewart. I don't normally tune into The Daily Show, despite the constant pleadings of my friend Gayle who's a major Stewart fan. I usually watch local news at 11 p.m. and then go to bed. But I digress . . . Jon Stewart was supposed to have as a guest the now infamous CNBC analyst Rick Santelli, he of the much-ballyhooed rant against the Obama administration's housing bailout proposal and how it would reward bad behavior and help people who bought more house than they could afford, people who Santelli called "losers" who made bad decisions.

But Santelli canceled his Daily Show appearance. And I'm so glad he did.

What Stewart & Co. aired instead was a damningly hysterical and tragic indictment of how business journalists, specifically from CNBC, blew the coverage of this economic crisis, how they cheered on large businesses -- which are now receiving mucho bailout bucks -- and that the CNBC staff are no better than the "losers" who made bad home loan decisions. (Video link here.)

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CNBC Gives Financial Advice

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Sure, we may not know what the future holds and just how bad this economy will get, but at least we know we'll have guys like Stewart to make us laugh through our tears.