David Carr on Jon Stewart and the Media

I agree with David Carr on this, but only a little bit:

"I enjoy Mr. Stewart in his regular seat where he is less reasonable, less interested in obvious targets and less willing to suggest that all political ideas and movements are like kindergartners, worthy of understanding and respect if only the media would get out of the way. His barrage against the news media Saturday stemmed from the fact that, on this day, attacking the message would have been bad manners, so he stuck with the messengers."

It's true the "Rally to Restore Sanity" seemed oddly lacking in a point-of-view -- something you can't usually say about "The Daily Show." But it's too easy for journalists to take the "oh he's just blaming the messengers" route in examining the state of our country's affairs. Stewart's done a first-rate job of analyzing and exposing how cable news trafficks in sensationalism and false equivalencies -- the words "breaking news" have become incredibly devalued over the last decade.

Carr knows that, but points out: "In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans." No big deal, in other words. But: walk into any congressman or senator's office -- or hell, walk into the White House -- and you'll more-than-likely find a TV turned on to Fox or MSNBC or (less likely) CNN. In some cases you'll find all three. Bizarrely, it's cable TV that is shaping the elite's view of the public discourse, and the elite returns the favor by going on cable TV around the clock to yell and call names. Karl Rove isn't on Fox every week because it's unimportant.

Reducing the cable TV audience to its numbers also ignores the multiplier effect: the opinions that viewers form in response to their TVs are the opinions they share with their family, friends and neighbors. It's why Glenn Beck, whose audience isn't that large in relation to the national population, is such an outsized influence in Tea Party circles. Or think about Rick Santelli's famous "Tea Party" rant: Who the hell ever heard of Rick Santelli before that rant? Can you even measure CNBC's audience? And yet who would deny that rant had a catalyzing effect in propelling the creation of the Tea Party movement? And do you think, say, Mike Castle or Ron Wyden think that movement was negligible in their own election losses?

Carr's right: we shouldn't rush to blame the media for problems that exist independently of them. But we can blame the media -- and cable TV in particular -- for normalizing screaming polarization: It's what sells best! Carr lets the messengers off too easily.

Philly Makes Me Sad

There's about three things wrong with this headline:

Boy, 15, shot in 2:30 a.m. bar fight:

"A 15-year-old boy was shot and critically wounded early today during a dispute inside a bar in North Philadelphia, police said.

Police said the youth got into an argument with a young man about 2:30 a.m. inside the El Callejon II bar at North Second Street and West Indiana Avenue in the Fairhill section."

Assassinating Awlaki

Remember when I said the failed cargo-plane bombs would probably be an excuse to justify the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American citizen working with Al Qaeda in Yemen? Queue the Wall Street Journal:

"The plot also underscores that the Obama Administration is right to target Awlaki and other al Qaeda leaders in Yemen with Predator drone attacks, rather than merely issuing a criminal arrest warrant. Awlaki is actively plotting to murder Americans, and stopping him is an act of self-defense. The attempt by the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights to thwart these attacks in a lawsuit could get Americans killed."

Making sure that the American government can't arbitrarily order the execution of an American citizen will get Americans killed, basically. For what it's worth, the ACLU and the CCR aren't actually asking that Awlaki's life be spared. They're asking that there be due process:

The groups charge that targeting individuals for execution who are suspected of terrorism but have not been convicted or even charged — without oversight, judicial process, or disclosed standards for placement on kill lists — also poses the risk that the government will erroneously target the wrong people. In recent years, the U.S. government has detained many men as terrorists, only for courts or the government itself to discover later that the evidence was wrong or unreliable.

Al Qaeda is bad. Awlaki may well be a bad guy. But laws and constitutions are the ways civilized people balance the dangers of the world -- including bad guys -- against the liberties and rights of citizens. There is always risk. The government should have to have a high standard for putting one of its citizens on an assassination list.

Rasmussen: The Coming Republican Overreach

We've been told for two years now that Barack Obama and the Democrats were mistaken about the type of mandate that they had when they won the 2006 and 2008 elections. It wasn't that Americans had embraced big government programs like "Obamacare," we were told, but that Republicans had been fired for their own fecklessness. The result? Democratic overreach that alienated voters and turned the tide back to the Republicans.

There's a lot about the theory that's wrong, but as Scott Rasmussen notes, it might be best for Republicans if they don't overinterpret their mandate on Tuesday:

The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.

This is the continuation of a trend that began nearly 20 years ago. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president and his party had control of Congress. Before he left office, his party lost control. Then, in 2000, George W. Bush came to power, and his party controlled Congress. But like Mr. Clinton before him, Mr. Bush saw his party lose control.

That's never happened before in back-to-back administrations. The Obama administration appears poised to make it three in a row. This reflects a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

In this environment, it would be wise for all Republicans to remember that their team didn't win, the other team lost. Heading into 2012, voters will remain ready to vote against the party in power unless they are given a reason not to do so.

It's possible, of course, that the politics itself is the problem - that everybody who gains power starts to look stale and awful after two to four to six years or so, and everybody out of power starts to look like the Next Great Hope during that time. Under these circumstances, nobody's going to have a mandate - and everybody's going to overreach. We no longer have generational dynasties like the Democrats did during the FDR-to-LBJ era or the Republicans did from McKinley to Hoover. The news cycle can now be measured in minutes; the political cycles as a result can probably be measured in years or months.

The Final Teen Spirit Mashup

So glad my friend Justin Blessinger sent me this:

Michael Smerconish's Confusing Column Against Newspaper Endorsements

I think if one takes Michael Smerconish's call for newspapers to end political endorsements to its logical conclusion, he would lose his job as a columnist for the Inquirer and Daily News:

"When any newspaper lines up alongside Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann, it unnecessarily compromises its status as an objective source of fact at a time when an increasing number of media outlets traffic in ideologically driven, artificial political debates. The vaunted wall separating news coverage and editorializing is sacrificed - apparently based on the assumption that readers are capable of consuming the paper's reportage from the campaign trail but unable to come to their own conclusions as a result of that information."

That's not actually an argument against endorsements, but an argument against the existence of editorials and opinion pieces at all. And it's wrong: The wall between the news coverage and editorializing isn't eliminated because the editorial department does its job. That only happens if the news department starts doing the endorsements -- and that's not what Smerconish is suggesting here.

So it's a confused and confusing column by Smerconish -- who, it should be remembered, endorsed Barack Obama to great fanfare in 2008 ... on his radio show and in his Inky column.

What Smerconish does isn't all that substantively different from Beck or Olbermann -- only he has a newspaper platform in addition to his radio show. I'm not sure how any reading of today's Michael Smerconish newspaper column isn't actually a call for the Inky and Daily News to bring and end to the Michael Smerconish newspaper column.

The Ben and Joel Podcast: Justify Yourself! Part Two | Infinite Monkeys

The Ben and Joel Podcast: Justify Yourself! Part Two | Infinite Monkeys: "In this, the second part of what may or may not become an ongoing series of interrogations, Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis ask Robb Leatherwood (a.k.a. Monkey Robb) what it means to be a libertarian... or an anarcho-libertarian... or an anarcho-capitalist/paleolibertarian. You really need to listen to find out."