Stop Me Before I Vote Again

But is she hot?
We all know that hot chicks make men stupid.
If Palin would have tongued Megan McCain while both were bethonged, the election would have gone a whole nother way.
Ever wonder why all those hot Blonde Republican sexpots get airtime?

So...wait...so your saying, Palin's book isn't any good?

i'm a palin zombocrat myself
of only recent conversion however
to me she's the gal robot in metropolis

http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/Metropolis00-761075.jpg

The newspapers are sniveling for their own bailout, MJS, and I'll bet they get some torturously fussy assistance. Most likely through regulatory facilitation of further consolidation, greased by money funneled through the banksters, who will see the need to Keep The Public Informed, once their bite of the proceeds takes shape.

I'll place another bet that the banksters' PR lackeys are cherry picking some Jeffersonian aphorisms, and preparing to deliver fatuous, unctuous encomiums to Enlightenment values.

I'm pretty sure Pat Buchanan, writing a speech for Spiro Agnew, is the source of the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism."

As to Michiko Kakutani -- she fits perfectly with the New York Times. That rag is all about pretense and pedantry.

Charles -- Though both Safire and Buchanan wrote speeches for Nixon and Agnew, Safire is widely credited with 'nattering nabobs.'

By the way, he seems like a somewhat dated and arbitrary example of the NYT's penchant for know-nothing knowingness. I mean, this is a paper for whom Judith Miller was a 'terrorism expert' and in which Thomas Friedman ineptly shares the kind of keen insights on globalization one gets while playing golf in the suburbs of Mumbai.

To me, everything you need to know about the kind of people who work for the Times can be found in the little mini-interview the odious Deborah Solomon conducted with Noam Chomsky a few years back. Some sample comments and questions:

'I've often wondered why there are more slang words for death and genitals than any other words. . .

'Your father was a respected Hebraic scholar, and sometimes you sound like a self-hating Jew...

'Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?. . .

'If you feel so guilty, how can you justify living a bourgeois life and driving a nice car?. . .

'Have you considered leaving the United States permanently?'

Between its philistinism, its war-mongering, its prolix, inelegant writing, I honestly don't know why people can stand reading it at all.

When I came to the states 20 years ago I read the NYT and the WSJ daily. There were a few areas in which I was sufficiently competent to be considered as an "expert" and was very well paid for that competence. The NYT was always and everywhere 100% wrong in these areas. I stopped reading it after a year. If I stumble across it now, I regard it as entertainment.

Yes, and when the print-papers are gone, we'll be left with arcane, impenetrable-prose-possessed blogs like this one.

Happy, happy.

Let us not forget that most blogs are parasitical in nature. They would, on average, have very little to say without their MSM host.

Blogs are destroying their print-paper host the same way humans are destroying their biosphere host.

Joy, joy.

"Between its philistinism, its war-mongering, its prolix, inelegant writing, I honestly don't know why people can stand reading it at all."

A description that applies equally well to the rest of the media as well, not just Pravda on the Hudson. I don't read the papers anymore and I feel we should boycott all mass media. Media outlets are all teetering on the edge as it is, let's push them over. Of course, the oligarchy won't allow its ministry of propaganda to falter, but once they've been bailed out we can at least dispense with the fiction of an "independent" media. Let's open some doors for the alternative press.

I've always considered the newspapers as entertainment, nothing more. When I was a kid, my grandmother who was visiting from Scotland used to get all the crappy Scottish tabloids like The Sun sent to her by my cousins every week. I used to read that stuff voraciously and to be sure, it was much more entertaining than the stodgy, self-important and pretentious Times, or the lowbrow hysterics of the Daily News or NY Post.

"Yes, and when the print-papers are gone, we'll be left with arcane, impenetrable-prose-possessed blogs like this one. ..Blogs are destroying their print-paper host the same way humans are destroying their biosphere host."

Hark, do I detect an MSM professional (or wanna-be) in our midst? Certainly sounds like one. Note the grand pronouncement leaping over logic and facts. The foolishly inapplicable analogy worthy of Tom Friedman. The knowing, world-weary tone.

But most of all note the contempt for other people, all those silly non-professionals who just care about stuff and write -- I mean that's presumably how s/he means blogs are destroying newspapers, right? By fact-checking them right and left. By reminding their readers how much people like Judith Miller and Tom Friedman suck? It can't be that s/he means blogs are stealing their content, since most blogs excerpt newspapers and then link out to their mostly free online editions. If anything, blogs are helping newspapers by feeding them readers and would-be ad clickers. If newspapers die, the last folks reading them will be bloggers.

Thing is, news of the newspaper's demise is premature to start with and the end of newspapers certainly doesn't mean the end of traditional news. And in the meantime, new possibilities for decentralized media are opening up, with blogs being but one component.

This notion that one institutional arrangement is the only way to do things seems bizarrely ignorant to me. It's like people who argue that the only way we'll ever have music is if the FBI cracks down vigorously on file-sharers.

Of course in fact the best music ever written was written before anybody had ever heard of copyright, much less "intellectual property".

Same goes for news. People want news and will find a way to get it, and pay for it if that's what it takes, with or without Pinch Sulzberger.

(Preferably without.)

The sky is not falling, Chicken Little.

But, how would I ever have known about Bristol and Todd without FOX News, the New York Times and Newsweek? It's absolutely vital that we keep these valuable national assets afloat with oodles of taxpayer dollars.

Vital, I tell you.

"we'll be left with arcane, impenetrable-prose-possessed blogs like this one"
i take offense on father S's behalf

his prose is seemingly
effortless
unself concious
translucent and pure

an alpine spring
of limitless
graceful profusion

that it's
also toxic
to wanna be waspish
but gonad-free
lipless librul simians
seems all to fitting