Saturday, October 16, 2004

6:36 PM |

• On a Lehman Bros report on Sinclair:

  Under the headline "Mgmt Chooses Politics over Shareholders" the report notes the following ...
  
  "In our opinion, Sinclair's decision to pre-empt programming to air 'Stolen Honor' is potentially damaging -- both financially and politically. In a best case scenario, we believe that this decision could result in lost ad revenues. In a worst case scenario, we believe the decision may lead to higher political risk. As mgmt has increased the co's political risk, we are reducing our 12-month price target to $9 (from $10)"

• On the present FCC chairman's response to questions raised by Sinclair's actions, from a former FCC chairman:

  His remarks are so far off the point, and he is so intelligent, that one must conclude that he knows what he is doing and intends the result -- tacit and plain encouragement of the use of the Sinclair airwaves to pursue a smear campaign.

• On the RNC threats toward Rock the Vote for daring to raise the issue of the draft:

  In a political campaign there are very few forms of political speech -- judged by content -- that should ever be subject to legal proceedings. But to threaten legal action to squelch discussion of a subject that is obviously a very newsworthy and relevant issue -- and one the country could face in the next four years -- is simply astonishing.

1:52 PM |

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''

9:25 AM |

Friday, October 15, 2004

"I think you're a lot more fun on your show," said Tucker Carlson to "Crossfire" guest Jon Stewart this afternoon. "And I think you're as much of a dick on your show as on any other," Stewart shot back. It wasn't the faux avuncularity we've come to expect from Stewart on "The Daily Show" but there, of course, he's playing a role. Here he was himself -- and he wasn't buying any of it.

From the moment Stewart sat down he made no secret of how repugnant he found the show. In fact, he said to Carlson and co-host Paul Begala that he had been so hard on the show he felt it was his duty to come on and say to their faces what he has said to friends and in interviews. What he said was that their show was "hurting America," and he was being only slightly hyperbolic. Stewart told them that when America needed journalists to be journalists they had instead chosen to present theater.

3:46 PM |

Thursday, October 14, 2004

7:08 PM |

I love the newfound solicitude for gay people being shown on MSNBC's late-night panel, particularly from Pat Buchanan, who in his rampaging homophobe days once urged Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Mario Cuomo to cancel NY's Gay Pride Parade or "be held personally responsible for the spread of the AIDS plague." (For other enlightened comments of gay outreach from Father Pat, click here and scroll down.) From the way Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan are trying to whip up righteous indignation, you would have thought Kerry had outed Mary Cheney tonight. I think what Kerry did was quite ingenious and useful: he deflected any future attempt to paint Democrats as the party of heathen sodomites by pointing out that the vice president's daughter is lesbian, the vice president and his wife love their daughter, sexual preference crosses political lines, so take this cultural wedge issue and stick it where it ouches--and got this across in such a caring, sharing way.

10:04 AM |

Monday, October 11, 2004

Before he is allowed into the debate hall Wednesday night he should be frisked or, at the very least, given a full frontal and dorsal go-over with an airport security wand to make sure he isn't wired and wearing a Radio Shack battery pack. There are simply too many photos of supicious bulges and snaking cords under Bush's suits to allow him to saunter into the third debate without a thorough patdown and electric swipe. If he needs to cheat for the debate, he can write cryptic notes on his cuffs like everybody else, or deploy the Morse Code blinking system he and Karen Hughes invented to send messages to each other across a crowded room. Because if he suddenly sprouts a pair of rabbit ear antennae out of his head like Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian, I for one am going to be very suspicious.

3:33 PM |