Three and a half months into my diet

Nightline recently aired a debate between some fat women and some thin women and called the piece “Is it OK to be fat?”   You can find the episode here.

I watched this program incredulously. What the hell do those wackos at Nightline mean?  Is it ok to be fat? What?  That question goes right up there with, “is it ok to play in traffic?”, “Is sharing heroine needles really that bad?”, and my favorite “is it really ok to sleep with several multiple partners without a condom?”.  Stay tuned for those Nightline episodes; I’m sure they’ll be riveting.

Must I say the obvious? Of course it’s not ok to be fat!

Now, before you jump up from your computer and point a finger at me screaming “biggot!”, settle down there.  Take a good look at me.  I’m not wearing a pointy white hat.  If you look closely you’ll see that I’m fat.  Granted, I’m less fat than I was three and a half months ago, but honestly.  I promise you.  I’m fat.

Dont get me wrong.  If what Nightline is really asking is “is it ok to discriminate” against fat people, then come on.  That’s another stupid question.  Don’t be silly.  It’s not ok to point and snicker at an obese person.  It’s not ok to fire someone, or refuse to hire someone, or promote them, just because they’re fat. That just makes you a jerk.

But is it ok to charge an extremely fat person more money for an extra airline seat if he or she can’t actually fit into one seat? Of course! That’s not discrimination, people.  That’s common sense.  You pay for what you use.  Why should it ever be otherwise? What does it matter why I’m using the extra seat?  Whether it’s for my infant? Or for me to stretch my legs out?  If I’m using two seats, I’m paying for two seats.

Is it ok to judge a fat person as unworthy?  Well, not any more than it’s ok to judge a person as unworthy because he’s blind, or deaf, or gay, or a Jew, or African American. And unless you’re a card carrying member of the KKK, then I don’t think you can really dispute this point.  Now that we’ve resolved that it’s never ok to discriminate against a fat person, let’s revisit the question Nightline asks in this piece.

Is it ok to be fat? Is this really a question we need to ask?  Before I set out on my diet back in November, I was an enormous 75 pounds overweight.  I was, and incidentally still am, clinically obese.  I’m working to change that.  Why?  Mostly because being fat is unhealthy, although I won’t deny that being skinnier also makes me feel better because I look better.  But here are some health issues that personally plagued me at a mere 75 pounds overweight:  sleep disturbance, snoring, difficulty breathing, asthma, sudden growth of a renegade right boob (due to rapid weight gain, scout’s honor), acid reflux, and highish cholesterol. Let’s not even discuss the fact that two years ago, at 38 and newly divorced, I consulted my doctor about the possibility of having a baby with just me, a bottle of mysterious sperm and a turkey baster.  You know what he said?  Lose weight!

Why?  Because getting pregnant at 75 pounds overweight is a recipe for disaster.  Heavier women develop all kinds of weight related issues while pregnant.  It’s a fact. So is it “ok” to be 75 pounds overweight and get pregnant?  I don’t know. Is it ok to invite gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and fetal morbidity into your pregnancy?

Of course, I’m well aware that women who are overweight do get pregnant, and they do have babies.  Often everything turns out just fine.  But it would be easier, and better, and healthier for both baby and mom if obesity were not an issue. That cannot be disputed.

75 pounds overweight, one month before my diet began

Watching the heavier women on this Nightline program argue that being “fat” didn’t mean they were unhealthy was disturbing.  I mean, I think it’s kind of a forgone conclusion that when you’re obese you’re going to have some health issues.

This doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you a person at risk for health issues. It’s pretty simple.  I think the women arguing that “being fat doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy” were confusing “unhealthy” with “unlikeable”.  Being fat doesn’t mean you’re bad. It doesn’t mean you’re ugly. It doesn’t mean people should dislike you.  It doesn’t mean that people should treat you like shit.

But it does mean that you’re at risk for heart disease, respiratory and vascular issues and I’m sure a whole host of others I’m not thinking of right now.  So from a health stand point, it’s certainly not ok to be fat. I’d venture to say that anyone who argues this point is mired in a heap of denial.

That kind of denial is something I understand all too well, so I know it when I see it. It’s still hard for me to look that label “obese” straight in the eye and embrace it as one that defines me.  But it does. I understand, on a deeply intimate level the desire to argue that being fat is ok.  But I won’t jump on that bullshit bandwagon.

No one is saying you have to be “thin”, least of all me.   No one is suggesting that everyone ought to be eating 1000 calories a day, or that everyone should weigh 115 pounds.  What is clear, though, is that if you’ve hit that magical number on the scale that makes you “clinically obese” then you’ve got some work to do.  I know I do.

Being fat doesn’t mean you don’t love yourself, and it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be loved.  It means you’re not perfect. Welcome to the human race. I’m fat.  I know it.  I’m changing it one day at a time.  And that, my friends, is what’s ok.

Oh man, this is classic.  Many people have watched Gretchen Carlson on Fox & Friends and wondered how can she be so dumb.  Alex Koppelman at Salon:

Like many of her colleagues on Fox, Carlson often plays dumb. In her case, that means looking up words like “ignoramus” and “czar,” or at least pretending to in order to score some points against liberals — and look anti-intellectual in the process.

Turns out, Gretchen was her high school valedictorian, graduated with honors from Stanford, studied at Oxford and is a talented classically-trained violinist.  Jon Stewart called her out on the absurdity of her ‘troubled mom trying to figure out this confusing modern world’ act:

Aaron Barnhart at the Kansas City Star was unkind in his assessment of the larger ruse of which Gretchen is only a small part:

The rule they always tell you in show business is be yourself, right? But not in conservative populist talk radio and TV. Look, I have no problem with conservatives being themselves. Bill O’Reilly and Dr. Laura and El Rushbo and (of course) Saint Paul Harvey all became huge in radio because radio values authenticity, and their essence bled through every second that they were on the air.

But it seems for every Billo these days there are three people like Carlson, Glenn Beck and Steve Doocy — people who probably have some Republican in them but are simply (and obviously) overplaying to the right wing because they know it sells.

How many times do we have to read that Rupert Everett blames his lackluster career on coming out as gay, when all evidence is that it’s because he’s a jerk?

As Neil Patrick Harris’s openly-gay star only seems to be on the rise to eclipse his Doogie Howser fame; as Cheyenne Jackson joins the cast of 30 Rock; as Ellen DeGeneres becomes a Cover Girl; and as Rosie O’Donnell shows no sign of gay celebrity fatigue, it seems lost on Rupert Everett that people don’t particularly care for him and the reasons have little to do with his sexuality.

Never mind that he upset a lot of people by writing a tell-all Hollywood book that was unflattering to those who considered him a friend.  Never mind that his plastic surgery foray was another example of botched movie star vanity.  And never mind that Everett never seems to get his story right.

For instance, after he tossed off his friend Madonna in the aforementioned gossip book, she wanted nothing to do with him.  What if your friend wrote these things about you:

His observation that she smells “vaguely of sweat”, to take one example. Or that, like all Hollywood’s alpha females, she’s something of a “she-man”. Or just possibly it was this bit that she didn’t care much for: “Just like America, everything about Madonna had changed. And what had happened had been carefully wrapped in psychological clingfilm and locked inside an interior fridge. Sometimes, in moments of stress, Madonna had power cuts and the old whiny barmaid came screaming out of the defrosting cold room.”

He wrote about how Guy Ritchie doesn’t like gays (not true), and that Madonna ditched her gay brother and gay friends to be with him.  He wrote about her celebrity spats.

And Rupert was shocked that she was upset.

Yet in February 2009, he told the New York Times magazine that he and Madonna were friends again.  Then just days ago he contradicts himself with The Guardian:

So has she forgiven you for that now?

“No.”

Really?

“Elephants don’t forget.”

Has she not forgiven you in a jokey way, or has she really not forgiven you?

“She doesn’t trust me any more.”

Oh dear! Although she’s probably not the only one. Everett’s memoir is entirely unlike the usual Hollywood memoir: he tells stories that aren’t always entirely flattering, about himself, about other people, about the way the star system works, which is fabulous for the reader, but perhaps less so for his subjects.

And Madonna read that and likely said, “There you go again, why don’t you just learn ‘no comment’ you twat?”  It’s not just his friendship with Madonna; Everett has stepped on pretty much everyone he has come in contact with:

Julia Roberts is “beautiful and tinged with madness”. When she gives him a lift on the Sony jet from Chicago, where they’re filming, to New York, he writes, “I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B.” Sharon Stone he describes as a goddess, but it’s only when he starts rehearsals that “I realised something that had hitherto escaped me. She was utterly unhinged.”

In July 2009, Everett was fired from plum Vanity Fair after he called his boss Graydon Carter–whom I adore–fat and weird:

Who does one have to fuck to get OFF that masthead? He’s such a weird character, that [Vanity Fair Editor in Chief] Graydon [Carter]. He’s certainly not the buffoon he looks like. This is the most amazing thing I found out about him. I was once staying at a hotel and I was in the room directly under his. He is an amazing fuck. And you can quote me on this. The screams coming from the woman were some of the purest sounds of pleasure I’d ever heard. And there I was sitting alone in my room unfucked. Suddenly it all made sense. That messy hair of his that I always thought was buffoon hair was buffoon hair hiding a monster cock. The next day I went down to breakfast and Graydon came in and I thought to myself, well, now I understand why you are always acting so entitled and walking on air even though you’re rather fat. It’s because grazing the grass between your legs is this appendage of yours. I did rather politely tell him that morning that I thought he was a very good fuck.

So, Rupert, that is how you get the F-off the Vanity Fair masthead, and his friends said he needed the money.

Through all of this,  Rupert seems blissfully unaware that the problem is that he is an asshole and if you work with him, he’s going to slam and spill the beans about you.

In 1998, Everett was cited as an example of how being gay doesn’t prevent your star from rising.  After that was written, he starred in An Ideal Husband (for which he garnered multiple award nominations); Inspector Gadget; The Next Best Thing; Shreks II and III; The Chronicles of Narnia; and the St. Trinian´s films.

But if you ask Everett, he’ll tell you he’s being held back because he’s gay.:

“The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business,” Everett, 50, says. “It just doesn’t work and you’re going to hit a brick wall at some point. You’re going to manage to make it roll for a certain amount of time, but at the first sign of failure they’ll cut you right off.  Honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out”

In April 2009 he told the Daily Beast pretty much the opposite thing:

But the reason my career is so up and down is that I get very little opportunity. There is just very little opportunity for a fag. That’s the reality. There isn’t. But I have no regrets for being out. None. It’s not like I’m missing out on that much.

Actually, it’s a surprise Everett made it as far as he did; after all, his ’story’ is hardly the stuff leading men are made of:

Rupert did not last even two years at London’s Central School for Speech and Drama in his mid teens, being expelled for “insubordination” (an early sign of his fiery, independent spirit). As soon as he moved to London he began exploring his sexuality. At seventeen he joined the flamboyantly campy and avant garde Glasgow Citizens’ Company. Over the next few years (in the late 70s and early 80s) he worked in theater and modelling.

It was during this period that the boy born with the silver spoon started working as a prostitute, or “rent boy.”

What about developing a gay fan base?  Everett is a fail there, too.  Gays who want the same rights as everyone else are pathetic just because he wants to live a life “outside the mainstream” as he says:

“I mean, if you are meant to have babies then great. But this whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian and then it gets cut out is just really weird….  It has to change. These awful middle-class queens – which is what the gay movement has become – are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still…”

So because Everett wants to be a freak, all gay people should want that, too.  In the same article, he insults the entire London theatre-going audience, which is essentially his own:

In London, the audience is like a bunch of old sluts who have had too much sex and can never cum. They’re mean and they dare you to entertain them.

Rupert, the problem is you have been so taken with your fame, and your fame-chasing; you are so taken with your rise that you’ve forgotten an element to being a successful actor is an air of mystery.  If you want to be a leading man, it’s one thing for you to be gay, but it’s another thing for you to continually talk about all the celebrities you are around, spilling their secrets and your private thoughts, telling the world about your prostitute days, tossing off your audience and gays who want families, and then expect men and women in an audience to suspend reality for two hours and picture you as the perfect leading man that they might like to see more of.

It doesn’t work that way.  Just don’t blame your crap career on anything other than your flawless ability to demonstrate to everyone that you’re a jerk who few people want to watch or get to know, Rupert.

The swine flu that is now an epidemic in the United States is likely traced back to a farm in North Carolina, and its first appearance in Mexico occurred near farms owned by Smithfield Foods.   We inject dairy cows with so many hormones that women who drink regular milk are three times more likely to have twins than women who drink organic.  The pollution from factory meat growing farms accounts for a fifth of greenhouse gases; that’s more than cars.

All of this occurs while 96% of Americans believe animals deserve some legal protection from harm.  We like animals.  It doesn’t matter our politics nor our backgrounds, we all agree that animals shouldn’t suffer.

These two ideas, the need to fix and protect the environment and the desire to not have animals suffer, was the common ground that Jonathan Safran Foer sought in his new book Eating Animals.  Tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble he read from it, discussed those statistics above and took questions.  His desire, he said, was to highlight the consensus we have on the environment and animal suffering to find ways to make better choices.

Foer has received a good deal of media attention for re-writing Fast Food Nation and Making Kind Choices, but that’s not a criticism.  It’s Foer’s own take, and every new voice that reaches new minds gets more of society thinking about what we are doing with factory farm meat growing.

We don’t think about its effects on our health, and we don’t think about how it’s hurting our environment.  Add Foer to the growing chorus of people who say: when will the mainstream media report this issue?

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

The bedroom may be a more private place, but when politicos insert themselves in ours, we’re going to be damn sure to set up a camera in theirs. – Queerty

One of the weakest defenses of keeping hypocritical gay politicians closeted was written up by Joshua Alston on Newsweek’s blog The Gaggle.  I expect to see the mainstream media try to maintain the status quo that the only thing the media should not report about is a person’s homosexuality, even when they wield their power to harm the civil rights of fellow LGBT people; however, I did not expect to find one so inarticulate and logically flawed.

Alston starts out reasonable enough in the post by framing Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick’s documentary Outrage! in the light the film was intended to be judged:

Of all the confounding behaviors that human beings engage in, perhaps none is more irritating—or more common—than hypocrisy. It’s fascinating when someone condemns behavior while engaging in it himself…
[....]
In the film, director Kirby Dick builds the case that there are politicians who live their lives as gay men, or at least engage in gay sex, yet have voting records that undermine gay rights.

Exactly.  However, Alston’s shoddily thought-out piece switches midstream when he focuses on the argument against outing these people:

[T]he film’s core argument—that closeted gay politicians should be outed—is still at issue. The job of a public official, after all, is to represent his constituency, not to vote in the way that would most benefit him. We live in a democracy, and everyone gets a vote, including bigots and homophobes, and they get to be represented as well. Now, it’s fair to suggest that the voting public has the right to know everything about its elected officials, including their personal lives. But if we knew the details of what everyone was doing and voted accordingly, who would we have to vote for? Political scandals over the years, ones that have nothing to do with homosexuality, have proved that most politicians have skeletons they keep. If a gay man wants to run for governor of a socially conservative state because he has terrific ideas on how to reduce crime, balance the budget, or bring new jobs to his state, should he put his sexuality front and center and risk going down to defeat? There’s a valid argument for both sides of that question, but Outrage pretends there isn’t. If you’re gay, the film suggests, then fighting for gay rights must always be job one, and anything less is an unforgivable betrayal.

The film’s core argument is not that all closeted gay politicians should be outed, but only the ones who are actively hypocritical.  Alston starts off with the correct premise, but when he is forced to justify the last remaining media topic ban on public figures, he changes the argument.

Outrage! does not argue “that the voting public has the right to know everything about its elected officials”; but it does argue that hypocrites should be exposed, and that the media is failing in its duties to inform the public of what boils down to a question of character.  Welcome to that club, Joshua Alston.

One of my readers, Ryan, made these points on an earlier post over this topic:

If a prominent and powerful senator who was secretly Jewish but made a habit of introducing legislation and supporting measures which would limit or take away the rights of other Jews, would it really be unfair, in your opinion, to expose that senator as a Jew? Should other people (including Jewish people) just keep their mouths shut and allow that senator to keep moving ahead with his campaign of anti-semitism simply because the senator “has a right to his privacy?” Perinally I feel that my right to fight for my civil rights is more important than the “right to privacy” of any gay politician who is attempting to limit or take those rights away from me.

Using his flawed change-of-argument, Alston brings up the gay man with “terrific ideas” who won’t be elected in a conservative state because he is forced to declare his homosexuality, lest he be exposed.  Never mind this scenario has nothing to do with Outrage! and its premise; Alston passes over the real glaring deficiency: that someone with terrific ideas would be voted down simply for being gay.

This shows who Alston was pandering to: liberals who don’t feel people should be denied a job, or public service, because they are gay.  Under Alston’s logic, Ted Haggard would still be leading New Life Church and Larry Craig would still be a Senator; the public would be none-the-wiser.  Homophobes and bigots, who previously adored these people, would never be challenged to face the basis of their bigotry.

Alston’s understanding of democracy

It might be Alston’s misunderstanding of how democracy works.  He writes, “The job of a public official, after all, is to represent his constituency, not to vote in the way that would most benefit him.”  No, Joshua, the job of a public official is to vote his or her conscience, and the public puts that person in office not to be controlled by the shifting winds of poll numbers.  This is consistently a point of criticism against politicians.  Conservatives and liberals both make the point.

The public puts politicians in office to become far more educated on the issues than the public is able to be, and to vote accordingly.  Politicians aren’t elected to be puppets of their constituency, although to ignore them is to put their re-election at risk.

Democracy also works when the media does its job.  Alston’s post underscores the ultimate shame that he and others in the mainstream media engage in: not informing the public.  It’s a dereliction of their responsibilities.  People like Alston decide that hypocrisy is not worthwhile to report to voters–including gay ones–so that they can make an informed decision.  If liberal and conservative voters can agree on one thing, it’s that they don’t want to elect an anti-gay closeted politician.

The media decides this information is not worth your knowing, as they report on just about every other facet of a person’s private life.  Again, my reader Ryan:

[S]enators, congressmen and all other elected officials should be held to a certain standard and shouldn’t be exempt from close scrutiny. In fact, close scrutiny of politicians’ personal lives routinely occurs when it comes to heterosexual politicians. Their extr-marital affairs, drug use, domestic violence, drinking problems and all sorts of other “personal” things are fodder for the press already. Do you really want the press [to] treat all gay politicians so differently from the way they treat straight politicians?

Joshua Alston’s post is a defense that doesn’t judge the film Outrage! on its own merits; he judges it on the mainstream media’s double-standard.   That’s the real outrage.

Click here to watch the Outrage! film trailer.

“Some of his erstwhile political enemies filled the airwaves Tuesday eulogizing him, a practice that might have baffled the irascible giant slayer: He was not above excoriating the recently deceased, including Orlando Letelier, the Chilean dissident assassinated in 1976, or the journalist I.F. Stone, who died in 1989.“  Ron Kampeas, JTA

That his many critics would now eulogize Robert Novak, who died of brain cancer this morning, is not surprising as people will do anything to be on television, particularly journalists.  But this blog is fundamentally against all the weepy revisionism and “yeah, buts” for Novak, one of the worst people there was in modern journalism.  Good riddance.

Is that harsh?  Unfortunately, so is Novak’s legacy.  He was a template of what was to become of American punditry and cable news, and his influence was fundamentally destructive to the United States.  You can read his big media defenders–who see his only failing as the Valerie Plame affair–to read his bright side.

The comments below focus on how corrosive the man was to the national discourse.

What is the legacy to which he most contributed?  A cable news industry that does little else but incite the worst in Americans’ passions, which has helped to condition a portion of the American electorate to willfully believe lies in obfuscated debates over our most pressing issues.

Novak paved and spit-shined the way for the Keith Olbermanns, Sean Hannitys and Glenn Becks, and their imitators. Here is a collection of words around the web about Bob Novak:

David Zurawick, Baltimore Sun:

Novak titled his 2007 memoir, “The Prince of Darkness,” and he was indeed a very dark force in cable TV news contributing mightily to the toxic culture of confrontation, belligerence and polarization that so defines cable TV and American political discourse today. There is no way to be nice about his impact on cable TV during its formative years – and his contributions for the worse to the tone and style of what passes for political conversation today.

Phil Bronstein, San Francisco Chronicle:

There was Robert Novak, screaming at someone — probably Michael Kinsley on “Crossfire” — like an enraged health care town hall meeting participant: “Death squads in El Salvador is a liberal MYTH!”

I haven’t been accused of being a liberal all that much, and, as Christiane Amanpour said so wonderfully in Iraq, “Wolf, I can only tell you what I can see,” but I can tell you reliably that Salvadoran death squads were as real as Scooter Libby and Evans and Novak.

At the time, I wanted to reach through the TV screen and strangle the guy into sensibility. Or have the two tragic dead men delivered, without benefit of makeup, on his front lawn.

It wasn’t a liberal-conservative thing. Death squads were a fact.

Whatever else Bob Novak did well, even superbly in his professional life — a great deal, I don’t doubt — at that moment he did a huge disservice to the truth and to the memory of thousands of people who died violently, painfully and without justification in El Salvador.

Jon Friedman, Marketwatch:

In Novak’s last prominent chapter, he was best known for reporting leaked information in 2003, identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.

He hid behind his journalistic reputation when he allowed himself to be used by the likes of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other members of George W. Bush’s inner circle. Novak was content to watch as the nation had to experience an agonizing investigation to explore what had happened.

To me, that underlines everything I didn’t like about Bob Novak and his particular style of journalism.

Alex Pareene, Gawker:

Novak’s role, which he understood and embraced, was to act as a proxy for political attacks by conservative politicians. You leaked your smear to Novak, and he reported that “neutral” Republican sources said something nasty about McGovern or Joe Wilson or even Fred Thompson. He was also generally considered a mean old man and his brain tumor was diagnosed after he was hospitalized after he hit a pedestrian in his black corvette and kept driving, claiming to be unaware that he’d hit anything.

Matthew Cooper, The Atlantic:

[T]here was a lot in Novak not to like, a mean gruff manner visible to anyone on TV, a stiletto pen that seemed more about destroying than illuminating. I disagreed with his politics but it wasn’t his politics which were infuriating. It was his arch, cutting style that made him one of the journalists I wanted to avoid becoming. It was his behavior in the CIA leak case that made me think still less of him.

The United States is better off without journalists and pundits that practice their craft the way this destructive, mean man did.  He may have  had talents as a journalist, but they certainly won’t be the legacy of the man with the fakest teeth in cable news.

President Eisenhower tried to warn us; Frank Rich tries to remind us.

This blog often cites Frank Rich as one of the most astute thinkers and critics of American society and politics.  His New York Times column is required reading for anyone who wants to know what is going on in the United States today.  He is, simply, the best.

Yesterday’s column is worth recapping, because Rich explores the sense that Americans are starting to wake up to the feeling that they have been “punked”, or taken for what they are worth.  He looks at Obama’s promises, and the reality of his administration thus far.  He also looks at the Original Punkers, the Republicans, who have made a habit of flat-out lying to their constituents during the current healthcare debate.  From Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post:

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

Back to Frank Rich, who watched this and other long-term developments in our political dialogue to write this column.  Below are some excerpts, with their original links:

What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

[....]

What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.

That the system is “fixed” is no longer just the concern of conspiracy theorists.  American General and President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned the American public about a growing military-industrial complex in his farewell address:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The influence of corporations and the groups that profit from war, defense and the banking system can be seen daily on our cable news programs, which Frank Rich also explores as a cause for the cynicism that the electorate can’t seem to change the system:

It’s a cynicism confirmed almost daily by events. Last week Brian Stelter of The Times reported that the corporate bosses of MSNBC and Fox News, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, had sanctioned their lieutenants to broker what a G.E. spokesman called a new “level of civility” between their brawling cable stars, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. A Fox spokesman later confirmed to Howard Kurtz of The Post that “there was an agreement” at least at the corporate level. Olbermann said he was a “party to no deal,” and in any event what looked like a temporary truce ended after The Times article was published. But the whole scrape only fed legitimate suspicions on the right and left alike that even their loudest public voices can be silenced if the business interests of the real American elite decree it.

The tone of Rich’s column hearkens back to Eisenhower; Rich shows that the news you watch is only the news the power structure deems fit to be packaged and consumed:

The revelation of that scandal did not end the practice. Last week MSNBC had to apologize for deploying the former Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe as a substitute host for Olbermann without mentioning his new career as a corporate flack. Wolffe might still be anchoring on MSNBC if the blogger Glenn Greenwald hadn’t called attention to his day job. MSNBC assured its viewers that there were no conflicts of interest, but we must take that on faith, since we still don’t know which clients Wolffe represents as a senior strategist for his firm, Public Strategies, whose chief executive is the former Bush White House spin artist, Dan Bartlett.

Looking to the Democrats to help staunch this hemorrhage of influence in American corridors of power?  Don’t.  The screaming matches at town-hall meetings, while as astro-turf as tea-bagging, are only aimed at the ‘least worst’ of the pigs at the trough:

As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the former Congressman Dick Armey, now a lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.

But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.

Welcome, America, to your system of governance and information.

Gerald Posner: A journalistic tour-de-force joins the Daily Beast. Click the photograph to subscribe to his feed.

If you were to ask a law student to name the top law firms in New York City, Cravath, Swaine & Moore would be on any informed list.  Cravath is one of those firms that inspires dread in its opponents, and merits respect from its peers.

Out of Cravath was born Gerald Posner, one of journalism’s pluckiest investigative reporters.

The New York Times lauded his “exhaustive research techniques” and the Washington Post cited his “painstakingly honest journalism” when they appraised his work, which includes biographies of some of histories darkest figures.

His book Case Closed, which was a nominated finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for History, earned him the ire of Kennedy conspiracy theorists everywhere when he backed up the primary findings of the Warren Report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in his assassination of Kennedy, as did Jack Ruby in his assassination of Oswald. “After Case Closed,” wrote Newsweek, “everyone thinks Oswald did it.”

Posner joins the Daily Beast

To be a reporter is a privilege. It is a privilege that the public should believe what you tell them about events that they neither have the desire nor the ability to investigate for themselves, that nonetheless affect their lives.  It requires trust.  To lose it is to never get it back.

Jayson Blair, Armstrong Williams, the blogosphere and the morass of ill-formed information out there means that the reputation of a news organization matters less now than the reputation of the person doing the reporting.  The public can’t rely upon a news organization to hire the best; they hire the most recognizable.  So it is remarkable that the Beast, the Barry Diller-backed, Tina Brown-led blog of blogs, went with such pedigree in its hire of Gerald Posner as its (paid) Chief Investigative Reporter.

After the reaction that they received for their hiring of disgraced reporter Judy Miller, the Beast got this one right.  Miller’s reporting helped bring the United States into the Iraq War, and was cited by New York magazine as “a revealing cautionary tale about the culture of American journalism.”  Eight months since her debut has yielded only five pieces for the site, the most recent in late May.

In contrast, Posner was hailed by the L.A. Times as a “classic-style investigative journalist”.  He is a man worth following; someone who tries not to allow his biases ruin the product that earned him accolades: his dedication to try to find the truth, wherever it may lead.

Five questions for Gerald Posner:

Q.  What is one thing you think every American should know?

A.  That there are other countries in the world besides America.

Q.  If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?

A.  Australian. I like the idea that it began as a penal colony, that it’s tucked away from most of the rest of the world, and I wouldn’t have to learn a new language.

Q.  What is one misconception people have about you?

A.  Because so much of my work is about dark and serious subjects – I’m the biographer of Josef Mengele, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray in addition to delving into terrorism and the heroin trade – that I must myself be a somber and serious person immersed only in The New York Review of Books and rereading War and Peace. In fact, I love everything from highbrow to popular culture. I can enjoy an evening watching Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect and then do a Buffy the Vampire rerun the following night. I mix the Financial Times with the New York Post. And I have a wicked sense of humor. Trisha often has to tell strangers, “He’s kidding.”

Q.  Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?

A.  No one’s death. But I was affected twice in the aftermath of terror events.

A month after the 1995 Murrah Federal Building bombing, I was in Oklahoma City standing at a makeshift memorial made along the chain link fence that closed off the bomb site. People had posted cards, letters, stuffed animals, crayon drawings from children, a wonderful, enormous spontaneous outpouring of emotion. The same emotions swept over me in the people’s memorial that formed at Union Square Park in New York in the first couple of weeks after 9.11. In both instances, I was surprised how those unprompted tributes were very moving and stayed with me long after the event.

Q.  In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?

A.  I often have that on the basest material level when I buy something like a new computer or cell phone. But I’ve never had it in my career, in part because I’ve never set goals. I just set out to do stories I like and to pay the bills. That’s why I still love what I do. I’m not a five year plan type of guy.

Subscribe to Gerald Posner’s Daily Beast stories by clicking here.

FIVE QUESTIONS – A SERIES

• BEBE BUELL – Artist, musician, scenester and lover; mother of Liv Tyler; embodiment of a rock era…I have five questions for you.
• EVAN WOLFSON – founder of the modern gay marriage movement…I have five questions for you.
• JIMMY WALES – Citizen of the world, sage to millions of editors of Wikipedia, which he founded…I have five questions for you.
• BILLY NAME – Famous Warhol live-in photographer; silverized the Factory; shot the cover of the Velvet Underground’s eponymous album; iconic portraits of Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick…I have five questions for you.

“Once these stories get out there, they’re hard to stamp out because our media do such a lousy job of speaking truth to stupid.” – Bill Maher, July 31, 2009, L.A. Times

CNN's Dobbsian President Jon Klein: "Yes! We have no standards!"

Ugh.  During the recent Lou Dobbs birther dust-up, CNN President Jon Klein confirmed a suspicion I’ve had that the cable news networks have fundamentally debased American journalism (cue laugh track).

King Birther Dobbs

Lou Dobbs should have stuck to business reporting.  Instead, Dobbs has fashioned himself after someone more of his era, Father Coughlin.  From Coughlin’s Wikipedia article:

He was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience, as more than forty million tuned to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s. Coughlin used his radio program to promote Franklin D. Roosevelt and his early New Deal proposals, to issue antisemitic commentary, and later to rationalize some of the policies of National Socialist Adolf Hitler and Fascist Benito Mussolini.  The broadcasts have been called “a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture”. His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, with his slogan being Social Justice, first with, and later against, the New Deal.

Dobbs as a modern-day Coughlin was evident with his alarmist xenophobic advocacy journalism on the subject of immigration. Now he enters the fracas as a light of hope for the “Birthers”, recently tying the two issues together to say Obama might be an illegal immigrant:

I’m starting to think we have a document issue. You suppose he’s un — no, I won’t even use the word undocumented, it wouldn’t be right.

The birthers are primarily composed of southern redneck Republicans (the party’s base, and Dobbs’ demographic):

The conspiracy has a regional flavor. Overall, even including Democrats and independents, only 47 percent of respondents in the South said they believed Obama was born in America, with 23 percent saying he was not and 30 percent saying they were unsure. In the Northeast and Midwest, the percentage of respondents who believe Obama was born in the U.S. was over 90 percent.

Ninety-three percent of Democrats say the president was born in the United States, as do 83 percent of independents.

Virtually nobody except for Lou Dobbs and America’s Backwater Republicans gives any serious consideration to the birthers.  So why is Lou Dobbs on CNN  promoting the tin hat redneck crowd’s most delusional hope to an international audience?  Ratings – the only thing that matters in cable news.

After Dobbs first salvo on behalf of the birthers was aired on CNN, he continued giving fuel to the birthers on his radio show by stating that, “Obama should put his birth certificate out there. I’m still looking for validation.”

Dobbs has no intention of backing down, but at least the birther nonsense seems to have hurt his ratings. Thank God for small favors.

Important lesson via CNN President Jon Klein

The most important lesson to be learned here has nothing to do with the birthers, and everything to do with how cable news is operating.  CNN’s President, Jon Klein, has had to defend Dobbs before, but his recent defense is illuminating:

We have no control over what he says on his radio show. It’s not a CNN radio program so he does what he does on the radio separate from what he does on our air. So we ask you and anyone writing about this, to look at what he says on CNN. It’s the only thing we control.

“It’s the only thing we control” is not correct.  You control giving Dobbs a platform.  You control what kinds of opinions you judge to be worthy of airing.

The defense Klein raises is problematic for the public interest, something that a news agency is supposed to hold supreme after “truth”.  It tells people turning to CNN that the network could care less about the integrity of the people they want you to hear, as long as they do their nasty business off ‘their air’.

Yeah, but…Dobbs did say these things on ‘your air’, Mr. Klein, and continued with them on his radio show.

Lou Dobbs as Father Coughlin is one thing, but the debasement of cable news journalism is more evident at Fox News, where few standards are in place for the pedigrees of their pundits, as I wrote last week:

Whether it be foul-mouthed stalker Rachel Marsden; the scandal-fabricating Aaron Klein; former gay porn star and male escort Matt Sanchez; or the crazy racist Hillary supporter Harriet Christian; the number of bottom-feeders with few journalistic–or personal–ethics who are paraded before us by the mainstream media is startling.  It’s not even a left-or-right issue.

With cable news thinking people like this are worth listening to, and people actually listening, there appears to be absolutely no way to fix this breakdown in our national discourse on cable news.  When there are no standards for opinion-makers, the quality of Americans’ opinions suffers.

Thanks, Jon Klein, for confirming that your network could care less what your pundits do and say when they are not on ‘your air’.  It logically follows that David Duke could have his own show on CNN, as long as he doesn’t talk about white supremacy on ‘your air’.

Or maybe even the white supremacy bit is okay, if you appear on Rachel Maddow.

Clinton in 1992, the year the right-wing attack machine made the President's wife a focus. "Murderer", "Lesbian" and "Communist" were standard fare for the right's labels.

The Republican victim machine has been in full-swing defending Sarah Palin, with Ross Douthat writing a misguided, tear-jerking obituary after Palin quit the Alaska governorship two-and-a-half years into her first term.  The conservative playbook on this is that the negative treatment Palin and her family received was “unprecedented” and unfair.

Have these people forgotten the treatment Hillary Clinton received in the 1990’s?  Frank Rich has not:

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Let’s also not forget that Rush Limbaugh suggested that Clinton is a murderer and the National Review, one of the right’s mouthpieces, helped propagate the rumors that Hillary is a lesbian.

Palin doesn’t help matters when, in her first attempt to be a serious conservative voice by penning an Op-Ed in the elite media that is the Washington Post, she got a lot of things wrong.  Not only did she try to pin the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill on Barack Obama (he had little to do with it); she appeared to not understand what the bill is about.  What little analysis she undertakes is little more than “applause lines“.  Ostensibly, this is again the media’s fault.