How bad a week did CNN have? Even Jon Stewart is dumping on his fellow liberal wannabe-journalists there today:

After giving credit to NBC News and giving the New York Post some gentle ribbing, Stewart moved on to his primary target. He suspected CNN may have taken some of his advice from the week before, as they notably stopped speculating as much as they had been before the suspects were identified. “It’s a much more responsible way of broadcasting than your usual ‘say it first and have Anderson Cooper correct it later.’”

Stewart reserved special disdain for CNN reporter Deborah Feyerick, who had lot to say about some barking dogs. He said something his dog just “stares out the window and barks even when there’s nothing out there. Sometimes he licks his own genitals. You can’t always read a lot into what they do… news-wise.”

But even worse was CNN correspondent Susan Candiotti, who let this gem pass her lips about Boston under lockdown: “It’s as though a bomb had dropped somewhere.”

“Yes, it does seem like that sometimes,” Stewart said with his head in his hands. “It’s not so much a metaphor as, what actually happened.”

Oh, and speaking of bombs and CNN, as Twitchy notes, CNN ran a segment today demonstrating how to build and detonate a pressure cooker bomb:

Has it really been more than 20 years since “Dateline NBC” showed us how to blow up a pickup truck using a simple model rocket engine? These days we have the Internet to show us how to build explosives, but it’s nice to know TV news is still there for us. How easy is it to make one of those pressure cooker bombs like those used in the Boston Marathon terrorist attack? It’s so simple, even CNN can do it. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

* * * * *

We’re sure CNN has a very good reason for showing how easy it is to build a weapon of mass destruction. We don’t know what that reason is, though. Kermit Gosnell’s trial was postponed today because the defense attorney called in sick, so they must have had some extra time to fill.

At least at the moment, you can find the video online fairly easily, but I’m not linking to it here. It’s sort of vaguely reminiscent of David Letterman’s late-1980s heyday, when he would drop stuff off tall buildings or place objects in industrial presses, because watching stuff go boom makes for fun goofy video. Letterman was being ironic by being deliberately stupid on television. What’s CNN’s excuse?

Besides — if you profess to believe that mere clip art and weapons-related language can kill — as CNN was pretending to believe two years ago — isn’t actually demonstrating how to build a bomb a remarkably ill-conceived idea? Or does CNN simply no internal collective memory of its past programming?

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“All eyes will be on Jay Leno’s Tonight show tonight,” Roger Friedman writes at Show Biz 411. “With one hour to go before Wednesday night’s taping, NBC sent Leno a clear message and used the media to do it”:

The Drudge Report is blaring “Fallon In, Leno Out” as GQ magazine released a special issue with heir apparent Jimmy Fallon on the cover. The Hollywood Reporter seized on a quote from Fallon producer Lorne Michaels that “Jimmy Fallon” is the closest thing he’s seen to a Johnny Carson. Wow. (I think Fallon is more like Jack Paar or Steve Allen frankly.) The New York Times’ expert on this subject, Bill Carter, followed with a story about a Fallon Tonight show moving to New York. Leno, with a quick trigger temper, will be exploding at these statements. With hints that he may be forced out by February 2014, Leno is sure to blow a gasket. When The “Tonight” show begins taping at 4pm Pacific, 7 Eastern, look for Tweets etc about his monologue. Yikes.

The Hollywood Reporter adds:

[An] announcement is expected to be made at the May upfront presentation to advertisers. With Fallon expected to launch as host in September 2014, Tonight will move from Los Angeles to New York, according to sources.

In a Fallon cover story for the April issue of GQ, Michaels confirmed that a shift is underway: “I’m not allowed to say it — yet. But I think there’s an inevitability to it. He’s the closest to [Johnny] Carson that I’ve seen of this generation.”

NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt and his late night and alternative chief Paul Telegdy are said to be actively looking for a Fallon replacement at 12:35 a.m. One possibility is another Michaels protege, Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live.

If the move goes through, presumably it would make Lorne Michaels, who created NBC’s Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970s, the producer (likely executive producer) of The Tonight Show, a role — or at least a time slot — he’s coveted for decades. Although Michaels describing Fallon as “the closest to Carson that I’ve seen of this generation” is more than a little ironic, considering the bad blood between two camps after SNL debuted in 1975, according to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad in their mid-1980s book Saturday Night:

Carson’s distaste for NBC’s other late-night show (shared by many if not most comedians of his generation) was well known within the network. It surfaced publicly in an August 1976 interview with Tom Shales of The Washington Post, when Carson blasted Saturday Night for relying on drug jokes and cruelty. He also dismissed the cast as hopeless amateurs who couldn’t “ad-lib a fart at a bean-eating contest.” Saturday Night retaliated the following season with some anti-Carson jokes on Weekend Update. In one, reporting that Carson had announced plans to do the Tonight Show live instead of on videotape, anchorwoman Jane Curtin noted that he had been “doing the show dead for the past fifteen years.”

Carson’s mid-century middlebrow cool eventually lost its sway over NBC, as Michaels’ counterculture-inspired brand of snark became the dominant archetype at the network and its spin-off, MSNBC. While Carson was very much a political liberal (“Paul Ehrlich, Gore Vidal, Carl Sagan, Madalyn Murray O’Hair”  was a recurring leitmotif for Carson describing his favorite “intellectual” guests” in his late-’70s New Yorker profile), he was smart enough not to wear his politics on his sleeve when performing his monologues. SNL took a very different approach to GOP presidents; as Michaels’ ex-wife and a writer on SNL said when Gerald Ford’s press secretary hosted an early episode of SNL, “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”

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Poor Al Gore.

Despite being $100 million richer after selling Current TV to Al Jazeera, the former vice president just can’t catch a break. Politico worries that Gore isn’t the “media darling” he used to be.

From “Today” to “Morning Joe” to “Late Show with David Letterman” to “The Daily Show,” Gore has come under attack by his interviewers for his decision to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera.

“Come under attack”?

– From Meredith Jessup of the Blaze, who asks, “When did legit media questions become ‘an attack’?”

I’d say it was right around the time that responding to a question became “heckling.”

Oh and, speaking of which:

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Rooting for Laundry from Melel Media on Vimeo.

I’m not sure if Jerry Seinfeld is aware of what his seemingly simple comedic riffs can reveal about us as a nation. Take the above interview with David Letterman from the mid-1990s, in which Seinfeld compares following modern professional sports with “rooting for laundry.” It’s a statement that packs a surprising punch, not just because of how free agency has made journeymen of professional athletes. But particularly considering how the culture that built and supported professional sports in the postwar years has been hollowed out, and is now, for all intents and purposes, gone. It’s a show about nothing, to borrow the title of the book on modern American nihilism written by one of Seinfeld’s most astute critics.

But every once in a while, there are flashes of the old heroics that made sports great — and if so, they must quickly be tamped down. Or as Rush Limbaugh noted on Monday, “Not So Long Ago in America, RGIII Would be Portrayed as a Hero, Not a Liar.” The target of Limbaugh’s ire is a column by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports headlined, “Robert Griffin III’s lies, Mike Shanahan’s poor management doom Redskins in playoffs.” Lying is rarely a word associated with a beloved rookie quarterback, riding the crest of his first season in the pros:

Robert Griffin III couldn’t run, at least not in any way resembling his usual sprints through the line and into open turf. Robert Griffin III couldn’t throw, at least not the deep darts that move the chains and keep defenses honest.

Robert Griffin III couldn’t lead the Washington Redskins’ offense, not after his knee buckled in the first quarter of this NFC wild-card game against Seattle. A couple plays later Washington took a two-touchdown lead but the deal was done. It would gain just 41 yards over the next two and a half futile quarters with Griffin as quarterback, all but assuring Seattle’s 24-14 victory.

Robert Griffin III couldn’t do much of anything Sunday except lie, which is what he’s been trained to do in situations like this.

Lie to himself that he can still deliver like no backup could. Lie to his coach that this was nothing big. Lie to the doctors who tried to assess him in the swirl of a playoff sideline.

So Robert Griffin III lied, which is to be excused because this is a sport that rewards toughness in the face of common sense, a culture that celebrates the warrior who is willing to leave everything on the field, a business that believes such lies are part of the road to greatness.

That’s remarkably brutal stuff — essentially a dismissal of the entire professional sport that Wetzel is paid to cover, to which Limbaugh replied on air:

I opened the program with some quotes from a story by a sportswriter, a guy who earns his living covering the National Football League and other sports, Dan Wetzel, who says that the thing to learn, the take-aways from yesterday’s Redskins-Seahawks game is that Robert Griffin III was responsible for the loss because he lied.  He lied about his ability to run. He lied about his ability to throw. He lied about his ability to lead. He lied because he couldn’t do much of anything yesterday, and he lied about it, and his coach accepted the lies, and as such, the Redskins lose.

Well, an NFL coach happened to hear me say this, and I got this e-mail from the NFL coach.  And this is profound.  It’s just one line.  “Leave it to liberals to destroy a great American tradition taught in the greatest American team game ever invented:  selflessness.  One of the reasons a great team wins a Super Bowl is selflessness.”  So the NFL coach who saw the game yesterday thought that RGIII was being selfless, putting the team first. He was doing everything he could to help the team win.

Shanahan said the quarterback — this is Dave Wetzel — quarterback who lies to me is better than our backup, I’ll go with the guy lying to me.  Anyway, I predicted, how long ago was it?  It was this summer or maybe back in the spring, I made a bold prediction that the forces of the left were marshaling against the NFL, focusing on head injuries, the concussions. I said, “I don’t know if it’s gonna happen in my lifetime or not, but if they don’t give up the quest, they’re going to succeed in altering this game in a way that nobody would ever believe.”  I don’t see them giving up.  In fact, people who earn their living covering the game, are perhaps unwittingly leading the charge to change the game into something that nobody will recognize.  I don’t know if it will happen in my lifetime or not, but clearly the effort is underway.

But in the meantime, the NFL remains the very definition of a cash cow for athletes, coaches, professional sportswriters such as Wentzel, and in particular the team owners. One reason is the staggering amount of money a committed fan will pay to attend a game. Even after the economy went south in late 2008 and continued its slump until, well, today, and plenty of leftwing journalists were eager to declare Barack Obama the second coming of FDR, overseeing a nation trapped in a perma-Depression as a result of his ill-chosen policies. (See also: Forgotten Man, The.) We’ll explore that topic right after the page break.

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Sorry, I can’t get to excited, pro or con, about Pete Townshend saying as he did last week on Good Morning America, “I’m a bit of a neocon.” First, he’s likely to walk it back if pressed, and second, as with Tina Brown in 2003, and her hilariously ahistoric reference to the “neocons of the ’30s,”  does he even know the lineage of the word and what it means? (As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2003 as neocon was beginning its ascension as the post-9/11 epithet of choice among the left:

If you don’t know how to use the word “neocon,” don’t. Seriously, don’t. If you’re even the teensiest bit unsure, don’t. Because when you use it wrong you illuminate such vast swaths of ignorance so as to make it difficult to be taken seriously on other subjects.

But I’m not sure why Townshend feels the need to talk politics at all when he does an interview.

As I’ve written before, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when The Who and Townshend seemed omnipresent – movies! Concerts! Solo albums! Tours! – Pete was my inspiration for first learning to play guitar, and then learning to “write” music on a multitrack recorder, as Townshend explored in the liner notes of his 1983 anthology of his demo tapes, Scoop. Everything multimedia I’ve done since – the videos, the podcasts, the XM show, etc. – all stem from reading about The Who, and how Townshend “wrote” music for them.

And creating Tommy, Who’s Next, Quadrophenia, etc., is certainly its own genius. I don’t expect any great political insights from the man. Because, even in the mid-1970s, as he was writing “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Slip Kid,” with its refrain that “There’s no easy way to be free,” and even as he was pledging his heart to his Meher Baba, his religious muse, he was perfectly capable of saying, as he did in 1974, that “I feel that the most spiritually correct of all political states would be a Communist one:”

Penthouse: Do you have many political convictions?

Townshend: Well, it it’s possible for someone who’s reputedly a millionaire — I’m not, incidentally — I’m morally very left-wing. I suppose as a member of the Who I’ve earned quite a lot of money. I’ve also spent that money. I’m a capitalist, yet I feel that the most spiritually correct of all political states would be a Communist one. But I think all politics are useless unless the component parts — the people, the leaders, the organizers, and the workers — are spiritually together. Communism at its purest can be corrupt, hurt people, and not do its job. Capitalism at its finest and most effective — even in a period where it was really working, like Fifties’ America — stands and falls on the quality of the people involved in it. It’s really great when you’ve got a good bunch of leaders leading you, but when they turn sour, you realize how little control you actually have to change them.

Most of The Who’s music in the 1970s was blissfully apolitical, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister would change that, as Townshend would rail against Thatcher’s reforms in England — and is still bitter about her rise in politics in his new autobiography. There’s a clip on YouTube of his promoting his White City solo album and longform video on the David Letterman show in the mid-1980s, where, after Letterman asks him about his then side gig, editing books for British publishing house Faber & Faber, Townshend goes on long rant about Thatcher, and you can hear the murmurs in Letterman’s audience: wha? Huh? Whatever, dude.

And White City is a fascinating project in its own right — with thundering music that as its accompanying video illustrates, champions…a depressed 30-something man passing his days nihilistically living on the dole. So much for “No easy way to be free.”

But who cares? I don’t follow politicians for their musical genius; I’m not going to care much either way about a musician’s insight into politics. In other words: won’t get fooled again. At least this time.

Update: Who Are You?

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Back in late 2004, Rush Limbaugh had lots of fun playing an interview that Tina Brown (now editor of Newsweek) had on her little-seen CNBC show with David Westin, then the president of ABC News, who said that the media needed to send the equivalent of foreign correspondents to the Red States, to witness firsthand how these strange people in the hinterlands live out their exotic day-to-day existences, and why they rejected the suave and debonair John Kerry for that hayseed George W. Bush:

WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.

As Rush quipped, paraphrasing Westin, “We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.”

Also in November of 2004 after the election was concluded, when Brian Williams replaced Tom Brokaw, then-NBC president Jeff Zucker attempted to sell Williams to the public, by proclaiming to USA Today that “No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian.”

You can just smell the condescension in that statement, can’t you? And it didn’t take long for it to begin to appear repeatedly in Williams’ broadcasts. (In some cases what didn’t appear in Williams’ broadcasts was equally worthy of comment.)

(Not coincidentally, Jeff Zucker’s Wikipedia page has this ignominious subhead regarding Zucker’s tenure at the network: “President & CEO of NBC Universal: NBC Goes from First to Last in Ratings.”)

At Red State this week, Erick Erickson has a lengthy essay on the vast disconnect between the MSM and its consumers or, as Erickson notes — increasingly, their former consumers:

It is not that Fox News is, during its day time news, more conservative. It is that Fox News actually expends effort to ensure it relates to the values and world view of many more Americans than most major news outlets. But the average reporter for the average newspaper or other press shop would rather lament a conservative bias at Fox News than recognize most of them have a liberal bias much more detached from the average American. Outside of that news organization, very few are even interested in what middle class Americans within fifty miles of an American river valley not named Hudson even care about. The people consuming the news are not viewed as the intended consumers by the press. The intended consumers are those at their cocktail parties in Washington and New York who will herald them and give them Pulitzers and maybe one day a cushy job in a future Democratic Administration.

Festering the problem, many reporters, thought leaders in the press, and news executives rarely encounter people in the heartland any more. The Mississippi River Valley is something to be flown over instead of studied and covered unless there is a natural disaster. Additionally, the new breed of political reporter knows little about politics before Bush v. Gore, couldn’t care less to have a sense of history to give them perspective, embraces the cosmopolitan culture of elite environs in New York and Washington diving only into hipster dive bars to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon to connect in some superficial way with the rest of the country, leans left socially and fiscally, and maintains an increasingly secular world view nearly identical to that of their other young, hipster reporter friends. “Professing themselves wise, they became fools . . . ”

It is a painful truth.

But there is more.

Read the whole thing.

Every four years, whether their candidate wins or not, in the immediate aftermath of a presidential election, the MSM issues mea culpas after spending the year jamming their thumbs down hard on the scales, or issuing polls that in retrospect were wildly off. This practice isn’t new, but it’s accelerated due to the MSM’s being called out by bloggers, Fox News, talk radio, and other forms of alternative media.

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Unlike the Last Brunch, we already know who will ultimately get stuck with the bill for this soiree:

Daniel –

President Obama is looking forward to meeting three supporters — maybe even you?

Want to meet the President? This is the last Dinner with Barack of this campaign. You could be there. Enter today.

If you can picture yourself there, then you better hurry up! This is the last Dinner with Barack of this campaign, and there’s not much time left.

Donate $5 or whatever you can, and you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to sit down for dinner with the President:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner

Good luck!

Obama for America

P.S. — If that doesn’t sound good enough, we’ll even fly you out — with a friend! How do you like that?

Speaking of which, at Power Line, John Hinderaker asks, “Is Barack Obama America’s Most Dishonest Politician?”

Letterman, to his credit, went on to ask Obama how much the national debt actually is. Obama evidently knew that if he said $16 trillion his audience would be horrified, so, incredibly, he pretended not to know! You have to see it to believe it:

Click over to Power Line for the clip as it went out over the airwaves. However, we obtained a video purporting to show the above moment from another angle. And although we can’t fully vouch for the provenance of this hidden camera footage, we’re showing it anyway, since it may indicate unique and heretofore unnoticed nuances into Mr. Obama’s answer:

Update: Regarding Obama’s Last Supper, just wait ’til you see the bill for the sacramental wine.

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We’ve already seen network TV newscasters, who make seven figure annual incomes taking shots at Mitt Romney’s weath, but late night entertainers earn much more, especially David Letterman, whose network career stretches back to the early 1980s, first with NBC, later with CBS. As Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, “David Letterman Mocks Romney’s Wealth Despite Being Worth $400 Million:”

You want to see a perfect demonstration of almost unimaginable media hypocrisy?

On Friday, CBS Late Show host David Letterman mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wealth despite being worth $400 million embedded by Embedded Video
Download Video :

DAVID LETTERMAN: I was talking to Mitt Romney earlier today, and he and his family got a big two day weekend planned. They’re going to hike to the top of his money.

Excuse me, but who the heck is Letterman to ridicule anyone for how much money they have?

According to our friends at Celebrity Net Worth, the Late Show host makes $50 million a year with an estate valued at $400 million.

As Forbes estimated Romney’s net worth at $230 million Wednesday, Letterman’s worth almost twice the target of his derision.

How’s THAT for hypocrisy?

Sometimes Dave’s just not all that thoughtful, it seems.

Related: Bain or Bane?

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Rich Lowry on “Meltdown with Keith Olbermann:”

There was only one way for the marriage between Keith Olbermann and Al Gore to end: in acrimony and, very likely, in court.

Olbermann, the former ESPN, Fox Sports Net, and MSNBC (twice) host, is now a former Current TV host. He is to the anchor desk what Zsa Zsa Gabor is to the marriage altar. The left-wing commentator joined the network started by the left-wing former vice president in an arrangement that both conceived of as a way to stick it to The Man, particularly The Man who runs The Corporate Media.

Olbermann gushed upon his hiring that Current would offer “news that is produced independently of corporate interference,” in a “model truth-seeking entity.” Gore bragged about his network’s ability to give Olbermann an “independent platform and freedom.” It turns out that both might have benefited from the discipline of a harsh corporate overlord, since Olbermann didn’t always show up for work and Gore couldn’t keep the lights on in Olbermann’s studio.

First as tragedy, then as farce doesn’t quite capture the history of Olbermann’s serial dismissals and poisonous exits. It’s farce over and over again. If Olbermann were to join Wayne and Garth as a co-host of Wayne’s World on the local public-access channel in Aurora, Ill., it wouldn’t be long before Olbermann denounced Wayne’s taste in heavy metal, complained about Garth’s inordinate airtime, and quit to start his own show with the public-access channel up the road in DeKalb.

Of course, as Lowry goes on to write, Olbermann signed a contract to be paid $50 million over five years, while broadcasting out of a cable facility not much more sophisticated than Wayne and Garth’s home studio:

• On Feb. 10, the lighting failed while Olbermann was on the air, and not for the first time. [Maybe Al was getting an early jump on Earth Hour -- Ed.] Three weeks ago, Olbermann’s team sounded out of patience. “David, once again Current’s technical breakdowns have had a negative impact on Countdown,” Price wrote on March 8. “We have pleaded with you to focus on the studio and the constant technical failures that diminish the program and turn away the viewership.”
• And Olbermann apparently was getting cut off quite a bit: one email said that “while Keith was in mid-sentence, the show cut away from him to a promo for the War Room,” the new show hosted by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. The situation was “wholly unacceptable … This diminishes the ratings of Current’s most successful show and proves to viewers that Current need not be taken seriously.”

As opposed to merely seeing the imprimaturs of Al Gore and Keith Olbermann. Keith though, is taking it all in his usual cheerful and modest self-effacing way, as he told David Letterman* tonight:

“It’s my fault that it didn’t succeed in the sense that I didn’t think the whole thing through. I didn’t say, `You know, if you buy a $10 million chandelier, you should have a house to put it in,’” Olbermann said, according to a CBS transcript.

The studio for his show, “Countdown,” was inadequate, Olbermann said, and he lost access to a car service because of an unpaid bill. He stopped short of directing strong criticism at former Vice President Al Gore, Current TV’s co-founder.

“He meant well. It didn’t go well,” Olbermann said. “He just wasn’t that involved in it and it was kind of difficult to get to him on these things.”

He quickly realized he’d made a mistake joining Current, Olbermann said, adding he stayed out of loyalty to viewers and his staff.

Which group outnumbered the other? As Lowry writes:

Olbermann must have thought that he was Edward R. Murrow — the legendary CBS newsman whose signature sign-off he aped — trapped in the body of a local newscaster in a very minor media market. He had a million viewers at MSNBC. At Current, he had 100,000 in the key 25-to-54 demographic last summer, before dwindling to 30,000, according to The Daily Beast. He probably could have reached as many people standing on a soapbox in Times Square on any given night, without having to sweat Current’s amateurish production values.

Or to put it another way, “If you play Olbermann’s career in reverse, it’s the story of a jobless man who rises from a lowly Internet channel to a prime-time talk show.”

Update: “Bombs Away!” The successor to the $50,000,000 chandelier isn’t exactly packing them, either: “Eliot Spitzer had just 47,000 viewers on Friday, hours after being hoisted into Olbermann’s time slot. How many ages 25 to 54? 10,000.” Breitbart News adds, “When Spitzer is fired, perhaps Current TV can hire Rosie O’Donnell, and finally hit that single-digit viewership mark they’re clearly seeking so desperately.”

(more…)

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Richard Rushfield of Ricochet paints a damning portrait of a news channel twenty-odd (very odd) years past its prime, and riding on fumes. “Tonight, in its coverage of the death of Whitney Houston, CNN gave its viewers a horrible glimpse into the hollowness at its core:”

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “Brian Williams Worries Jon Stewart Has Been Too Tough on Occupy Wall Street” — Newsbusters, November 1st, 2011.

This from an “objective” news anchorman best known for these classic moments of moral equivalency:

• “NBC: Founding Fathers Could Have Been Terrorists” — Brian Williams, as paraphrased by Ed Morrissey, June 30th, 2005.

• “Williams: Like Terrorists, U.S. Special Forces Willing to Go on Suicide Missions” — Newsbusters, August 10, 2006.

• If you ask the Tea Party what they want to take the country back from, “they would say, ‘from the Trilateral Commission, from the big bankers, from the Council on Foreign Relations.’” — Williams in an interview with David Letterman, August 24, 2010.

Bonus quote: When Williams debuted as NBC’s nightly anchorman in 2004, then-NBC president Jeff Zucker told USA Today,  “No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian.”

How many layers of irony accompanied that quote? The number could be infinite.

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Everyone has their own stories about where they were, and what they did on September 11, 2001 — this is one is mine.

At about 6:45 a.m. Pacific time, we were awakened by our phone. On it was a friend from Britain, whom we had met when he was a senior employee in a San Jose dot-com start-up, but was forced to move back to England after the inevitable layoffs of his start-up began.

“Turn on the TV”

His message to my wife? “Turn on your TV.” Which channel? “Any channel.” As she blearily talked to him, I fumbled for my glasses, fumbled for the remote, couldn’t find it, and crawled out of bed to manually turn on the set.

The results were the images the nation spent the day having seared into its collective brains, beginning with a split screen of the World Trade Center in flames, alongside a replay of one of the planes going into the second tower to be hit. We managed to wake up just in time for the announcement that another plane had just been flown into the Pentagon.

We then turned on our laptop, plugged it into one of two LAN jacks I had installed a year ago in our bedroom (to my wife’s amusement, back then) and alternated between watching the news via satellite, and getting what information we could from the Web, which we also to check in with friends via instant messages, and on two of our three phone lines to make sure they were OK. Like many Americans, we have a friend who works very, very near the World Trade Center, and several members of my wife’s family are scattered about Manhattan.

Although phone service to all of Manhattan York was terribly slow to non-existent, we were able to find a cousin via email and a friend in an online forum. He had gone online hoping to find someone to “report in with” and we were online at the same time, looking for him.

Our friends and family were all very, very lucky—it just took a while for some of them to check in or for us to reach them, due to the terrible chaos and outage of phone service to Manhattan. Our friend who’s office was located far too close to ground zero for comfort managed to walk back to her apartment, call another friend in Boston, who called us soon with the good news, soon after we watched the World Trade Center implode with our chins located somewhere near the floor.

Related: Bruce Bower on the PJM homepage, on the media coverage from that day, which plenty of YouTube clips from Howard Stern, David Letterman, and other broadcasters. And Kathy Shaidle, who’s in New York today, features a clip of a businessman who called 911 from inside the WTC, which abruptly cuts off as the first tower disintegrates. It is, needless to say, utterly chilling:

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David Letterman proves that you can take the host out of NBC, but you can’t take the NBC out of the host. Click over to Big Hollywood for the video; as John Nolte writes,“Letterman Sounds Blacklist ‘Dog-whistle’; Threatens to Ban Trump for Being a Communist Racist:”

Was questioning George W. Bush’s intelligence racist — a phony narrative Letterman himself relentlessly pushed?

Was digging into Bush’s National Guard records three-years into his presidency racist and off-limits?

Letterman knows Trump is no racist, he’s just trying to chill the billionaire into silence and at the same time send a ‘dog-whistle’ to his showbiz pals to follow suit. They all watched Obama’s poll numbers drop as Trump went after their precious one, and now they’re hurling around the word “racist” just as readily as McCarthy hurled “communist” in order to shut Trump up and shut him down.

This is nothing more than a variation of the showbiz blacklist of the 1950s; the creation of a phony charge in order to intimidate into silence and marginalize a political opponent.

Just as there are Birthers, there are now Racers — people obsessed with race and using the race card as a political weapon.

You’d think Dave would be more “thoughtful” than that.

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At Townhall, Victor Davis Hanson writes that “In short, Obama has ensured that the exasperated antiwar movement will never be quite the same:”

By bombing Libya, President Obama accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:

a) War-mongering liberals. Liberals are now chest-thumping about military “progress” in Libya. Even liberal television and radio cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support — and at a time of soaring deficits — is well worth supporting, in a sort of “my president, right or wrong” fashion. Apparently liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish “best and brightest.”

QED:

• “Obama in 2002: Toppling Brutal Dictator a ‘Dumb War.’”

• Thomas Friedman wishing President Obama a success that seems positively anathema to the long-term foreign policy company line at the New York Times.

• MSNBC’s Ed Schultz asks, “Schultz: ‘Are You With The Terrorists, Or Are You With The President Of The United States?’” Say Ed, let’s ask the man who sat in Jimmy Carter’s box seat at the Democratic convention in 2004 and near concurrently dubbed anti-American Iraqi terrorists “Minutemen” that question shall we? Or David Letterman, for that matter.

Of course, as Bryan Preston writes:

The “are you with the terrorists…or are you with the President of the United States?” question is morbidly ironic. Never mind that for years many figures on the left have explicitly sided with terrorists — Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, etc, with Schultz ever once calling them out on that. In Libya in the current fight, no matter which side you choose, you end up on the side of terrorists.

Much more from VDH on Libya on his Pajamas Express blog.

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Fox News rounds up “Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts,” to which Yid with Lid adds two more for a classic Lettermanesque Top Ten list — just add them both to the ever-growing pile of not-so-final countdowns and we can resurrect this infamous YouTube clip:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

In Europe, the USS Neverdock notes, “Berlin sees most snow in December since 1900s.” Glad to see that eco-Anchluss is working out so well for them.

Meanwhile, as far as Britain and botched predictions, let’s flashback to a year ago to a post we had on January 8 titled, “The Alpha And The Omega Of Liberal Fascism:”

Granted, it’s from a British newspaper, which means take it with a grain of salt (or at least, as big of a grain of sodium chloride as you’d take an article in an American newspaper), but if true, this story sounds truly frightening:

Pensioners burn books for warmth

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.

Jonathan Stearn, energy expert for Consumer Focus, said: ‘If pensioners are taking such desperate measures to heat their homes it is shocking. With low wholesale prices and increasing profit margins, there is clearly room for energy companies to make price cuts immediately.’

Ruth Davison, of the National Housing Federation, said: ‘The spiralling cost of energy means heating homes has become a luxury rather than a necessity for many people – particularly the elderly, low paid and unemployed.’

As science blog Watts Up With That? notes, “Shades of Fahrenheit 451″

But in addition to Ray Bradbury’s famous dystopian novel (which previously echoed more than a little in last year’s Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act story), it’s also the alpha and the omega of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, now celebrating its second anniversary. The rulers of National Socialist Germany burned books because they were frightened by their content; the citizens of socialist England burn books because of their nation’s whackadoodle environmentally correct energy policies.

And speaking of which, great “Final Countdown” find by Sonic Frog.net:

Prince Charles: Eighteen months

to stop climate change disaster

The Prince of Wales has warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless urgent action is taken to save the rainforests.

In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a £15 billion annual programme was required to halt deforestation or the world would have to live with the dire consequences.

“We will end up seeing more drought and starvation on a grand scale. Weather patterns will become even more terrifying and there will be less and less rainfall,” he said.

The P.C. prince made the above claim in May of 2008. (He would make yet another final final countdown this past summer, and no doubt, there are more to come.) Those eighteen months he warned us about so portentiously have now passed.

So to paraphrase Lauri B. Regan at the American Thinker, “Hey Chuck, how’s all that global warming working out for you?”

Update: “Only 9,099 Of Last 10,500 Years Warmer Than 2010.”

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One of the Ronald Reagan’s first gestures when he took office was to remove the solar panels installed on the roof of the White House by (of course) Jimmy Carter. Flash-forward to 2010: as if he didn’t need yet another comparison to the failed one-term Democrat, President Obama says…Welcome back Carter!

Solar power is coming to President Barack Obama’s house. [Insert obvious Scott Brown rejoinder here -- Ed] The most famous residence in America, which has already boosted its green credentials by planting a garden, plans to install solar panels atop the White House’s living quarters. The solar panels are to be installed by spring 2011, and will heat water for the first family and supply some electricity.

The plans will be formally announced later Tuesday by White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairwoman Nancy Sutley and Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush both tapped the sun during their days in the White House. Carter in the late 1970s spent $30,000 on a solar water-heating system for West Wing offices. Bush’s solar systems powered a maintenance building and some of the mansion, and heated water for the pool.

Obama, who has championed renewable energy, has been under increasing pressure to lead by example by installing solar at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, something White House officials said has been under consideration since he first took office.

Which brings us to…Welcome back Kerry and yet another flip-flop — as recently as two weeks ago, it was reported that “The Obama administration has nixed the idea of reinstalling solar panels on the White House roof:”

Some 32 solar panels were first installed on the executive mansion’s roof by then President Jimmy Carter as part of his efforts to tout clean, renewable energy during the 1970s, when the U.S. faced severe shortages and price spikes after an oil embargo by Arab countries. Carter held a rooftop news conference in 1979 to show off the panels and discourage reliance on The panels were yanked off after Ronald Reagan took office a year later, but they didn’t disappear. Instead, some of them have been stored for the past 30 years by environmentalists at Unity College in Maine, where they were used to heat water in the school’s cafeteria. Last week, a group of students loaded one of the vintage 6-by-3-foot panels into a biodiesel van headed for Washington.

The group was led by Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org, who described the mission on his blog: “If the president can’t climb up on the roof and hammer in some solar panels, clearly we need to push him up.”

The technology used in the Carter-era solar panels is now outdated, but a California company called Sungevity offered to outfit the White House with new panels for free. More than 8,000 people have signed on to a Facebook group in support. McKibben appeared on David Letterman’s “Late Show” last week to plug the effort as well.

Denied a meeting with Obama himself, McKibben landed an audience with three midlevel White House officials last Sept. 10, “who told him, politely, no dice,” according to The New York Times.

“They refused to take the Carter-era panels that we brought with us and said they would continue their deliberative process to figure out what is appropriate for the White House someday. I told them it would be nice to deliberate as fast as possible, since that is the rate at which the planet’s climate is deteriorating,” McKibben told the newspaper.

Yes, it’s entirely possible that within eight million years, there will be no atmosphere at all.

But the climate in Washington may be changing far more dramatically in less than a month.

Update: Not surprisingly, Allahpundit has fun with this story:

Seriously? On the very day that Obama/Carter comparisons have started to penetrate the international press?

Inevitably, someday soon, The One’s going to be away on a fishing trip as part of one of his umpteen vacations. And then, suddenly, disaster.

Meanwhile, Rush questions the timing: Mondale yesterday, a Carter homage today. And note the “Change” poster Rush highlights — from 1976.

Incidentally, T-shirts are available in the lobby.

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At Ricochet, Rob Long links to economist William Anderson of the Krugman in Wonderland blog, even more necessary since the Times’ economist (whose mid-century Keynesian-Galbraithian anti-free market worldview recalls bowtied Irving R. Levine, minus the gravitas) instituted his three-inches-or-less rule. As Rob writes:

On one of my favorite blogs, Krugman in Wonderland, economist William Anderson regularly explains the pathology of the NYTimes’ flagship economics columnist.

Here he is, in an open letter to Paul Krugman, taking apart one of his recent columns, arguing for the repeal of the Bush Tax Cuts:

In your column today on extending the lower tax rates that now exist on the highest levels of income, you justify your point on two levels:

1. The government needs more revenue and the state needs to take as much property as possible from private owners;
2. Wealthy people are unlikely to spend every penny of their income immediately, so it is important for the Political Classes to get their hands on those funds, as governments will spend freely in the short run.

Thus, from what I can tell, you believe that it is the Very Duty of Everyone to spend everything quickly, and since you are advocating such beliefs publicly, I would like to challenge you to practice what you preach. Here are some suggestions…

He goes on to recommend that Krugman impose his own tax rates on himself; spend 100% of his current income; dump his investments; and refuse to buy commodities.  He winds up this way:

I realize that you might be objecting by now. After all, why should you be the fall guy? However, as I read your words, you are claiming that there not only is an economic problem with paying less taxes, saving money, and abstaining from some personal spending in order to save for the future, but also a moral problem, then I would hate for you to be forced to act both unprofessionally AND engage in immoral behavior.

Holding the left accountable for its nutty philosophies?  Nicely done.

Oh sure, Paul will alter his lifestyle the same time that greeniacs such as Al Gore, James Cameron and fellow Timesman Tom Friedman vacate the mansions they’ve spent years cultivating their Mini-Me personas to justify.

Elsewhere in the world of daft reactionary economists, Obama-voting Jim Cramer now apparently sees Democratic apparatchiks behind every corner (though that’s understandable when you work for a GE-owned network.)

…if you are an owner of stock, any stock, if you are using the stock market for retirement or for savings to put your kid through school or to augment your paycheck, I think you are now beginning to see the silver lining of the miserable economic news: change in Washington. In fact, every time we see a downtick in the popular polls for the administration or Congress the large stockholders I know secretly cheer. They can’t cheer out loud without looking like Scrooge. Or they fear the wrath of Obama, which, on Wall Street, by the way, feels like the wrath of Nixon. It is, however, how many of them privately feel.

You know it. I know it. It is just that nobody wants to say it. Nobody wants to even believe it, as it so downright cynical. And, of course, nobody wants to criticize this president other than the people who are paid to criticize — the Republicans in Congress and various news entities that cater to the right. You take your public life in your hands the moment you do.

Nahh. As the Professor writes, “Relax, Jim. It’s safe to criticize them now. And soon it will not merely be safe, but fashionable.” Even Palace Guard comedians like Jon Stewart and David Letterman are now permitted by their network bosses to admit that the clothes have no emperor:

And finally, speaking of Recovery Summer Bummer, Michael Ramirez reminds us that you have to break a few eggs to break the economy:

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Return with us now to those thrilling days back in November of 2004, when Brian Williams first replaced Tom Brokaw, George W. Bush had just been re-elected president, and while Dan Rather was still playing out his string at CBS, he and his then-network were still reeling from those funny documents supposedly from 1971, but magically produced in New Times Roman type on a laser printer. That’s when NBC president Jeff Zucker told USA Today, “No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian.”

Back then, USA Today aided NBC’s marketing department by painting Williams as the anchor best poised to understand those strange Red Staters in the Mist who helped to re-elect President Bush to a second term, despite everything the networks had thrown at him:

“I’ve got to get out a lot,” [Williams] says. “The New York-Washington axis can be a journalist’s worst enemy. Stories have a funny way of sneaking up on you, and the American people have a funny way of deciding what their reality is. You’ve got to spend a night in Dayton and Toledo and Cincinnati and Denver and in the middle of Kansas.”

An example of the kind of story Williams likes to report came this fall when he flew to Dundee, Mich., to take the pulse at Cabela’s, the popular hunting and fishing mail-order house whose megastores draw 4 million customers a year.

Williams reported — presciently in light of President Bush’s re-election — that Cabela’s customers were a force to be reckoned with: God-fearing conservatives who like guns, fishing and the outdoors, and that in 2000, “six in 10 gun owners voted for President Bush.”

One hunter, a young woman, told Williams in a checkout line that she had already picked the tree she’d shoot from when deer season opens.

Recalling that day, Williams says: “I own an air rifle, mostly to scare the deer in our backyard, but I wanted to go back to our newsroom and say, ‘Guys, this is who you don’t know. While we haven’t been watching, this is what America has become.’ Not to pander, not to customize the news, but a newscast that forgets what its audience has become and takes its eye off the ball in terms of what America is, is doomed to failure.”

Flash-forward to 2010, and we see that Brian should have heeded his own advice:

Appearing on the Late Show on Monday night to plug his Friday night Dateline on the 5th anniversary of Katrina, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams bizarrely asserted “we’re still enjoying the fruits really of the Clinton economy,” claimed Tea Party activists who say “we want our country back” want it back “from the Trilateral Commission” and ridiculed their presumed hypocrisy as he insisted “you see a lot of signs, ‘Federal Government Out of My Social Security,’ ‘Federal Government Out of My Medicare and Medicaid.’ But for the federal government, of course, those programs would not exist.”Plus, he passed along how “I’m hearing a few people say” that President Barack Obama won’t run for re-election because he “wants to somehow transcend the presidency,” citing a British columnist who contends he was “never supposed to be an ordinary President.” Williams considered the possibility Obama could be as consequential as Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton: “Jimmy Carter converted the post-presidency, redesigned the idea of an ex-President. Solving diseases and bad elections around the world. Bill Clinton with the Clinton Global Initiative trying to do the same thing.”

When David Letterman raised the disparity between gluttonous Americans and kids starving around the world, Williams rued self-centered Americans as he incongruously touted: “We’ve had a good run here. We’re still enjoying the fruits really of the Clinton economy.” Huh? The current economy is doing well? And I thought the line was that Bush drove the economy into the ditch and we’re all being saved by Obama? (Or was he saying the Clinton years made us selfish?)

Letterman soon wondered: “When they say ‘we want our country back,’ who, what, what are they talking about?” That prompted an answer from Williams which sounded more like derision than impartial reporting: “If you ask them, they would say from, ‘from the Trilateral Commission, from the big bankers, from the Council on Foreign Relations.’” Williams sounded like he’s still living in the 1980s.

That’s too bad, because a newscast that forgets what its audience has become and takes its eye off the ball in terms of what America is, really is doomed to failure.

Still, as far as television personalities cocooned in the New York-Washington axis go, it’s not to hard to find someone even more insular and out of touch than Brian.

Related: And speaking of a legacy media out of touch with middle America, At NewsReal, Lori Ziganto and Jenn Q. Public round-up “10 Bigoted Remarks Made by the ‘Tolerant’ Left In Obama’s ‘Post-Racial’ America.” Here’s one more entry that’s too late to make the list, but would have likely have been worthy of the judges’ consideration had it arrived in time: “Kirsten Powers’ Long, Hot, Race-Baiting Summer.”

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If you missed it on Sirius-XM, the latest edition of PJM Political is now online. Click here to join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for a look at Washington and beyond:

• Bill Whittle of PJTV.com interviews the gang from Ricochet.com, including:
  • Former Reagan speechwriter, now at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, Peter Robinson.
  • Former Cheers producer Rob Long.
  • James Lileks of Lileks.com
• Ed Driscoll interviews Lileks about David Letterman, Andrew Breitbart, Shirley Sherrod, and the non-contiguous information streams that are causing the ever-widening inability of the left and right in America to communicate. Plus Captain America comes to Hollywood, Mad Men, and more!
• Allen Barton of PJTV.com talks with Terry Jones of Investor’s Business Daily and Tom Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute about Massachusetts’ plan to bypass the Electoral College.
• Joe Hicks of PJTV.com talks with William Owens, founder of Community Faith and Policy, on the roadblocks to a post-racial America.
• Produced by Ed Driscoll.

Click here to listen!

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Yahoo’s TV blog notes, “It seems not a week has gone by this summer that comedian and The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg’s strange antics haven’t been in the news:”

It should be noted that Michaele and Tareq Salahi are not publicity-shy by any means, and the idea that the couple could be picking a fight with the outspoken co-host of a popular daily talk show in order to get attention is not unbelievable. But this incident is just the latest in a series of attention-getting antics by Goldberg.

Just in the past month, Goldberg has been in the news for what many critics saw as her defense of Mel Gibson’s latest alleged misbehavior, calling him her “friend.” On July 19th’s show, Goldberg’s speech appeared slurred, and she admitted that it was because she had just taken an international flight and she was “still drugged” from taking something for her fear of flying. The video of Goldberg struggling to read the teleprompter became a viral sensation on the Internet and on cable news broadcasts.

Then, this week, Goldberg confronted former “Bachelor” contestant Jake Pavelka, calling him “full of garbage” when he said “The Bachelor” wasn’t “an acting job.” “Darling, I’m afraid to tell you you’re full of garbage — that is an acting job.”

With all the attention Whoopi and her show are getting lately, maybe Whoopi is beginning to treat “The View” as a kind of acting job, too.

Hopefully Whoopi’s comments about the moon landings being faked and Roman Polanski not guilty of “rape-rape,” and her predecessor’s belief that the former president deliberately crashed multiple planes into buildings and killed 3000 people were “a kind of acting job” as well.

I mean, I don’t think you can be as smart as they are and actually believe what they believe.

Oh, wait a minute.

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