“people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government” and “6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government” compared to those who watch no news”…”the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”"

That’s being charitable.  ”that something” is known as stupidity.

Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy

“Free speech does not mean free camping.”

If memory (or cut and paste) serves me, free speech shares the First Amendment with a prohibition against:

“…interfering with the right to peaceably assemble ”

Except for a few miscreants, the camping has been relatively peaceable.

It’s not the first time that Ms. Saunders has demonstrated her ignorance of Constitutional law.  I understand why the paper feels the need to have a token Reactionary in the editorial section, but why did they pick the most stupid one?

And now obvious questions are being asked:

… critics muse that Mr. Murdoch’s free-wheeling and politically conservative hand in British reporting may have influenced American journalism as well – particularly in the well-regarded Wall Street Journal, whose parent company Dow Jones was acquired by Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2007.

For its part, the Journal’s editorial page fired back about these charges in an editorial for Monday’s paper:

When News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch secured enough shares to buy Dow Jones & Co. four years ago, these columns welcomed our new owner and promised to stand by the same standards and principles we always had…

… [regarding] Friday’s resignation of our publisher and CEO, Les Hinton, who ran News Corp.’s British newspaper unit during the time of the alleged hacking . . . on ethical questions, his judgment was as sound as that of any editor we’ve had.

To help readers understand what makes this such a galling non-denial denial, we pause here for a concurring opinion from the hereafter:

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

The above is from the suicide note of Vincent Foster, an aide to the Clinton administration who killed himself in 1993 after being savaged in a series of Wall Street Journal editorials during the preceding two months.

In other words, it wasn’t the Journal‘s editorial-page standards that anyone was concerned about when Murdoch took over.  The issue is whether Murdoch pushed the news operation into the op-ed section’s moral cesspool.

I am disappointed with the Pakistani government because they have banned the new Bollywood comedy movie, “Tere bin Laden.” This movie is about a Pakistani TV journalist who interviews a fake bin Laden double to secure to promote his career and a U.S. visa to pursue his dream of breaking into American TV.

This is pretty odd, since the government allows Ali Saleem to air his show, Late Night with Begum Nawazish Ali.   Here, Ali Saleem is the cross-dressing Pakistani socialite version of John Stewart.  Despite being asked provocative questions and being exposed to Begum’s criticism, politicians line up to be on his show.

I always thought the Pakistani government had a sense of humor beyond some Asian version of Benny Hill, not just because they tolerate Late Night with Begum Nawazish Ali but in the way the government pisses all over its close ally, the US.  (And this is comedy). For example, Pakistan claims to be an American ally and receives billions of dollars in aide to fight religious extremists in their country while the same Pakistan government generously redistributes that aide to the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other religious zealots who are responsible for terrorist acts in and outside Pakistan (including killing US soldiers in Afghanistan or the 2008 Mumbai Attacks).  Just recently, Pakistan has taken US aid to subsidize its recent purchase of two 635 megawatt reactors from Beijing for its plutonium production complex where Pakistan continues build nuclear weapons so they can blow up their arch enemy India or sell on the global black market to another terrorist organization.

I guess some things just aren’t funny – like Tere bin Laden!

Haha a cross-dressing Jon Stewart!  I wish I spoke Urdu or they’d subtitle that!

There’s a major profile in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine of veteran Washington, D.C. reporter Mike Allen of Politico:

Allen’s e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.

Like many in Washington, [White House communications director Dan] Pfeiffer describes Allen with some variation on “the most powerful” or “important” journalist in the capital. The two men exchange e-mail messages about six or eight times a day.

Now, I could weigh in on all the alternately snark-worthy and/or unsettling anecdotes in the NYT’s mammoth profile of Allen, but Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post has already done so in rather devastating fashion (noting that even leaving aside the celebration of Politico’s self-conscious and self-promoting shallowness, portions of the Times piece are “like reading a David Lynch screenplay.”)

Instead, I’m interested in the (perhaps even longer) untold story of how Allen arrived at this point in life.  After all, it was only six and a half years ago that he became a well-known journalist the old-fashioned way — co-writing a story for the Washington Post that was immediately hailed as “one of the most memorable pieces of White House journalism produced in the Bush era” and was substantially responsible for the conviction of a high-ranking government official on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Unless you’re a hardcore junkie regarding trivia of the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case, however, you probably have a dim idea, at best, of what I’m talking about.  Perhaps these words will refresh your memory:

… a senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge….

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Granted, Mike Allen’s moment of celebrity for breaking this story faded in part because the proverbial other shoe never fell — the identity of the “senior administration official” was never revealed publicly, much less those of the leakers or the journalists involved.

But I suspect it’s not a coincidence that immediately after reading this article in September 2003, ex-Bushite press secretary Ari Fleischer sought high-priced legal help and refused to talk to FBI investigators without a promise of immunity.  Or that Fleischer would eventually admit speaking to the Post’s Walter Pincus on July 12, 2003, as part of a series of phone calls to (at least six?) Washington journalists he made with WH communications director Dan Bartlett from Air Force One during a flight back from Africa.

Pincus himself testified in Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury trial that Fleischer had leaked to him about Plame in that conversation.  As it happens, on July 12, 2003, Pincus was working on an article for the Post untangling some of the lies the Bush administration had told about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, a piece on which he shared a byline with… Mike Allen.  (Not surprisingly, Pincus was also an unnamed source in the Post’s scandal-breaking story quoted above.)

I suppose that if you asked Allen about this now, he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and say, “Ah, but that was a long time ago.” If he remembered at all, that is, in the blur of his near-sleepless life collecting tidbits of gossip and false leads for Politico.

That the latter is what has made Mike Allen a truly powerful reporter in Washington says more about our politics than I care to imagine.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

For example, given the well-documented perversity of the Washington Post‘s op-ed pages under Fred Hiatt, it’s probably no surprise that second-tier staffers blow off steam by grumbling and making sarcastic jokes in informal lunch-room conversations.

So, it happens that yesterday, a bunch of them were sitting around on a break at a table with that morning’s Wall Street Journal — lying open to Karl Rove’s opinion piece offering unsubtle GOP-friendly suggestions to the “tea party” movement (including not forming a third party).  The talk turned to how soon it would take Hiatt to ask the staff to gin up a me-too column from one of the WaPo’s ever-growing stable of former Bush administration mouthpieces.

Then, realizing it was April Fools’ Day, one of them said, “You know what would be funny?  If we wrote up our own piece and put it under the name of Dan Quayle.”

“Who’s Dan Quayle?” asked one of the younger staffers.

“The 1980s prototype for Sarah Palin,” another answered.  “Young, supposedly irresistible good looks, and dumber than the day is long.”

“Seriously?  How dumb was he?” asked the younger staffer.

“Bill Kristol was considered his ‘brain’.”

A long pause.  “Holy crap!  I guess you’re right.”

“Exactly!  So wouldn’t it perfect to have a column with advice for the teabaggers from Dan Quayle — the patron saint and godfather they never knew they had?”

Unfortunately, just then Fred Hiatt walked in for a cup of coffee, overhearing the suggestion.  And he thought they were serious.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

For years, McCain relished being an outsider and a maverick, a style that often led to battles with his own party’s leadership. Today, for reasons that friends and McCain observers say could range from unresolved anger to concern for his right flank as he seeks re-election to genuine dismay about Obama’s agenda, he is helping lead a fiery crusade of GOP loyalists against Democratic priorities…

Democrats argue that McCain has marched to the right, pointing to his opposition to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court after years of trying to avoid battles on judicial nominations; his damaging criticism of the Democrats’ climate change plans when he was an early supporter of cap-and-trade legislation; his attacks on AARP when he actively sought the powerful lobby’s support in the 2008 campaign.

… there was speculation that the post-presidential McCain would return to the Senate and emerge as an Obama ally, the latest turn in his “Country First” narrative going something like this: White House dreams dashed, the grizzled old politician yet again puts service over self, patriotism over party and joins with the new young president to guide America through a crisis.

It seems clear, though, that winning another Profile in Courage Award and the approval of elites by following such a course is not what McCain has in mind.

Of course, McCain is hardly losing “the approval of elites,” nor does he have any reason to fear that happening, if his near-omnipresence on TV’s political gabfests is any indication.   Instead, he’s seeking what he’s consistently sought over the past couple of decades — attention.

And Christina Bellantoni at TPM has a story this morning explaining why the GOP has adopted a conscious strategy of encouraging him, making him “the front man” in opposing Democratic healthcare reform efforts:

A Republican staffer who worked for McCain in 2008 said the party spent “millions of dollars bolstering his national image,” so it makes sense for him to be the go-to guy.

“Does anyone know who Mitch McConnell is?” the staffer asked.

This, by the way, would be the same conscious strategy that Politico is doing its small part to boost by treating McCain’s “emergence” as an Obama critic as an objective news story.  But I suppose that’s no surprise, either.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

“[Charles] Johnson told me that he’d never considered himself a ‘conservative.’”

Yeah, I’ve never considered him a conservative either – the word that springs to my mind is ‘reactionary,’ or ‘war-monger.’

Trial by Monster Truck

I can’t determine which is crazier – the claim that Obama shouldn’t be President because he wasn’t born here, or the belief by a large majority of Repugs that he didn’t wind because little old ACORN managed to steal 9.5 million votes.

Are they stupid, crazy or does this just demonstrate the success of the big lie technique as applied by Faux News and the Wrong-Wing Media Echo Chamber?  Or all three?

Combine this with the obvious popularity of Caribou Barbie among the wingnut set, and you come to realize that Idiocracy is closer at hand than 500 years in the future.

Maybe we could make the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial more popular with the Palin crowd by including monster trucks, flamethrowers and chainsaws.

*Update 11/24/09* case in point: