Happy Hour Open Thread
* A refreshingly sane take on Pitney-gate from Peter Baker. He points out (as I did below) that presidential stagecraft is an oft-practiced art, for reasons good and bad.
The core question that the critics need to answer: Even if this was staged to some degree, didn’t the goal of allowing an ordinary Iranian to ask the leader of the free world a tough question justify this relatively minor breach of Beltway press protocol?
* Speaking of Pitney-gate, White House press sec Robert Gibbs has no regrets:
“I wouldn’t do it differently, and I would do it again,” he said. “We thought it was very important to get a question in from someone in Iran, to have somebody to be able to ask the president a question who’s living with this. There’s no other way to do this.”
* Duncan Black reminds us that Pitney-gate is, at bottom, a battle over what gives news outlets their authority.
* Wow, so Mark Sanford apparently booked a ten-day trip to Argentina. Did he think a governor could disappear for that long without anyone noticing?
* Media Matters versus Michael Savage.
* The Weekly Standard doesn’t think much of Rahm Emanuel’s grandiose assertion that his boss’ Cairo speech was a Mideast game changer.
* Dana Perino says the moral of the Sanford mess is that we need to elect more women, but it’s worth noting that perhaps there are other, even better reasons to do that.
* Hmmm, this is odd: Spencer Ackerman reports that Janet Napolitano, who recently was forced to apologize for that report on right wing extremism, says she doesn’t think the recent murders vindicated the report.
* TPM reports that Arlen Specter, in his newly-minted role as loyal, team-playing Democrat, has come out in favor of the public health care option.
* Dems still don’t have the votes to get the big climate change bill passed. This one’s gonna be awfully close.
* Joan McCarter says that conservatives should be thrilled about the way ABC News handled its Obama health care special. Hmmm, maybe all that mau-mauing from the right had a purpose to it?
* And here’s today’s installment in the Michele Bachmann chronicles.
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“The Weekly Standard doesn’t think much of Rahm Emanuel’s grandiose assertion that his boss’ Cairo speech was a Mideast game changer.”
.
This is a territorial objection. Neoconservatism was there first and has its flag planted firmly into the grandiose.
Nicely put, Bernie. Territorial in two senses. More broadly, I really do think it’s underappreciated how devastating it would be to various schools of Republican foreign policy thought if Obama is even moderately successful in foreign policy terms…
ABC News played it about like any sane person knew they would with or without any pressure. Conservatives are geniuses and victims at the same time in their own minds.
TMZ reporting Michael Jackson has passed
NBC and CNN still saying “rushed to hospital,” so I’m hoping…
La Times now reporting he has passed as well.
Ten day trip to BA, eh? Are the MSM still pretending to believe Sanford when he says he went down there to break it off with her?
Greg – I think so. Obama has to be something of a worst-case character from the viewpoint of neoconservatives (frightened that history has passed them by) and the more traditional we-love-weapons-like-we-love-our-mothers Republicans given his charisma and political talents and the tenor of the times. On the other hand, I’m not sure I even want to know how much money is being pumped into Dem candidate coffers from the military industry.
We’d followed the stop-Koh campaign when it began to gear up. He’s now confirmed.
So ABC held a press conference with the President last night with almost 200 people waiting to ask questions. Only 10 or 15 got called on.
Am I to believe that the head of the AMA and that Insurance CEO had absolutely no idea that they were going to get to ask a question and that the housewife sitting next to them might get the opportunity instead?
Ya gotta remember, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.
Don’t you always break up with your mistresses over a ten day period?
Our media is terrible and gets worse by the day.
Hey, have you seen this news article?
New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…
Item in the LA Times this morning on plans to restore full diplomatic ties with Venezuela. We expect the odd comment from our favorite characters on the right. Permit me to reprise a short song (’Ollie vs Hugo, the Fracas in Caracas’) from my work-in-progress musical, “The Dreams of Ollie North”.
We gonna be wailin’
On that Venezuelan
Me and Sarah Palin
Gonna bring him down.
Mano a mano
Me and the Chicano
My fist’s a piano
It’s gonna hurt that clown.
My Wasilla flower
Got oxycontin power
We gonna make him cower
We gonna bring him down.
Verse is not well served minus paragraph breaks. We artists ought not to suffer such indignities.
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