For Campaigns The Candidates (And We) Deserve

Does anyone else think that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are being trivial with their commercials and comments about who's tougher, the Osama-killer or the would-be one? On NPR this morning, Michael O'Hanlon, author of Bending History, a new book about Obama's foreign policy, had this to say:

I tend to think we have two outstanding candidates, two honorable men who are pragmatic and fairly centrist in a lot of their views of the world. But their campaigns are already in overdrive, even on an issue that you would consider to be relatively non-divisive, like the death of Osama bin Laden. And I think both campaigns need to look in the mirror a little bit and ask just where they want to take the country these next six months.

Orwell Lives (Or Laughs)

Writing in the American Spectator, an overheated Jeffrey Lord says that the KKK and Nazis were leftists and agrees with Bill O'Reilly that U.S. leftists are are fascists for using their free speech rights to organize an advertisers' boycott against Rush Limbaugh -- which wouldn't have gotten any traction if Limbaugh didn't have the potty mouth of a mean 12-year-old who's afraid of girls. I thought conservatives were all about individual accountability.

Lord's "left is right" logic gave me a headache. Go here to read about the meaninglessness of "fascist" as an epithet. When I was in college, campus radicals hurled it at university administrators because of their decisions about teaching assistant compensation. A couple of years ago, Roger Ailes called NPR executives Nazis. And so it goes -- name-calling in lieu of substance, what all too often goes for political discourse in the 21st century (a persuasive argument against evolution, which ought to please the ignorant right-wingers-- Oops!...sorry).

Elite Media Kegger In Newt's Honor

A California Moderate

David Stockman, President Reagan's first budget director, said the so-called Reagan revolution never happened. He increased taxes and the size of the federal government. Experts quoted in this NPR piece wonder if today's GOP would nominate him. Imagine what conservatives vying to be top non-Ron would say about a California moderate (by today's measure) with a skeleton like this waiting to be let out of the closet:

In 1978, Reagan campaigned against a referendum in California called Proposition 6 that would have banned gays and lesbians, and possibly anyone who supported gay rights, from working in the state's public schools.

The bill was supported by the Christian right and sponsored by state legislator John Briggs. The measure failed, and Briggs later said it was solely because of Reagan.

Now, "Voyageur"

You can and should listen to Canadian folkie Kathleen Edwards' upcoming album, Voyageur, for free at NPR. It doesn't rock quite as steady as her earlier records; it's more spacious, atmospheric, and, frankly, commercial. Here's hoping it breaks big, as she deserves.

Higher Powers, In And Out Of The Newsroom

David Carr is media columnist for the New York Times and author of a harrowing drug addiction memoir, Night Of The Gun. On Dec. 28 NPR rebroadcast an October Carr interview by "Fresh Air"'s Terry Gross. Re-listening to a Carr interview is almost as good as a repeat of "Dexter." While his voice, injured by smoking, radiation treatments, and possibly exposure to toxins while he covered the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a little rough, he speaks about my parents' beloved business in smooth, graceful cadences. Transcript here, podcast here.

Excerpt one, on the omniscient and indispensable elite editorial intelligence behind daily newspapers:

When I wake up in the morning and the gun goes off, I'm checking Twitter. I'm checking RSS feeds, and I get four newspapers at my house every day. I get the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Star Ledger - because I live in New Jersey - and, of course, the New York Times.

And the reason I do is because the day before this, all this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot. But I don't really know what part of it is important. And I used to think it was so silly that newspapers would - like, I'd go to our page one meeting, and they'd be organizing the hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile, the Web is above them, pivoting and eliding, and all these stories are morphing and changing. And I thought: Well, how silly is this?

But you know what? I came to want that resting place, where someone yelled "stop" and decided, "Look, this is stuff you need to know about going forward." Newspapers have become a kind of magazine experience for me, where they're - where it's a way to look back at what has happened.

And on his faith life and the great mystery of altruism:

I am a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of - it's good to stand with my family. It's good that I didn't have to come up with my own creation myth for my children.

It's a wonderful group of people that I go to church with, and it's community. It's not really where I find God. And sort of what the accommodation I've reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I've been helped - without getting into the names of specific groups - by all of these strangers, you know, who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life.

And one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. And not only is that not a general human impulse, but it's not an impulse of mine. And yet I found myself doing that over and over again.

So, am I underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good?

And so that's - that's sort of as far as I've gotten with a higher power thing, is I'm - you know, I'm kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I mean, I've done a bunch of terrible things, and yet I'm able to, for the most part, be a decent person. How is that? Do I have some inner strength of character? I think not. I think something else is working on me.

You know, I think it's okay to sort of like have a superstitious belief in God and not really have thought it through. I think it's okay to just - I think there's freedom in allowing for the possibility of it. Like, I don't have a presence. I don't have some idea in my mind of a woman or a man figure or anything like that.

But I find the spaces between people, whether I'm making a newspaper with them or in recovery or living with them as family or friends or - I find something really godly in that. I don't have trouble acknowledging that.

"Get in Line," Ron Sexsmith

NPR is a showcase for great new music. Its music app is the best thing you can get for your iPhone. Just this morning it introduced me to Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith's new album, "Long Player Late Bloomer," whose first song, above, will go down as one of the great codependency anthems, and God knows we need more of those. I also learned about two choir members from Brooklyn who started a band called the Sweetback Sisters. Their smoking 2009 album is "Chicken Ain't Chicken."

Turn Up Your Radio

NPR is failing politically but succeeding journalistically.

NPR's "Morally Deranged" Critic

Jeffrey Goldberg is appalled by the NPR sting -- the sting part, not the NPR part:

This is a horrible story, and not because this silly man from NPR kept on chewing while his fake donors told him they represented an organization founded by Muslim Brothers, or that he seemed to agree with the anti-Zionist invective they spewed. What is horrible about this is that an NPR executive has lost his job (and his next job, apparently) after falling victim to a truly pernicious sting operation run by a morally-deranged individual. Schiller is being punished (everyone at NPR named Schiller is being punished, in fact) for saying a couple of dumbass things in private, and nodding in agreement to another set of dumbass statements. How about we turn this story around, and assert that these types of sting operations are what is morally egregious here; that humans often say stupid things; and that a person's life should not be destroyed for making the sort of statements made in the Schiller entrapment.

Dead Air At The Top

Regardless of political bias, which is unavoidable in the media, NPR is responsible for some of the best programming and broadcast journalism in the country. Too bad its reporters and producers have been so poorly served by management just as the right has decided to make a federal case out of the network's measly appropriation.

Two Liars, Two Dupes, And A Lunch

Two people pretending to dangle $5 million in Muslim Brotherhood money snooker a couple of NPR development executives. Not much here to commend either side of the conversation.

"Episconixonian" Takes Congress To Woodshed

Speaking this morning with NPR's Audie Cornish, Reagan budget director David Stockman explains how Democrats have poisoned and paralyzed discourse about the federal deficit by stigmatizing any talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare and Republicans have done so by stigmatizing tax increases (often by forgetting to mention their hero Reagan's $400 billion a year in new taxes).

Stockman's right. They're all a bunch of scoundrels. The "Compact With America"? "Compact" is the operative word. Cutting a few hundred billion from discretionary spending? Chicken seed. Peanuts. Pennies on a $1.4 trillion annual problem, victimizing the least among us to protect the vested.

From now on, I don't want to hear from any president, senator, or congressman who doesn't talk about the three-legged stool of some entitlement cuts, some defense cuts, and some tax increases. Any politician who fails to do so is putting the future of our country at risk for the sake of his career. Rep. Jim Rogan did what he thought was right even though he knew he'd lose his seat. Saving the U.S. from stagnation and bankruptcy will take his kind of honesty and courage. President Obama could make the first move by speaking up for the findings of his own deficit commission.

"Tales Of Brave Ulysses," Cream

Performing in May 1968 on the Summer Smothers Brothers Show
Hat tip to NPR Music

Clapton Is Y-----

This is sweet: Via NPR Music (the world's coolest iPhone app) I learned about a recurring series where obsessed, nostalgia-tripping geezers pressure malleable, desperate-to-please interns veteran NPR staffers invite their young colleagues to review classic rock albums they've never heard before. Here Beca Grimm gently patronizes "Disraeli Gears." Reminds me of the time I slow-danced to "Sunshine Of Your Love" in 19--... Oh, never mind!

Palin To End Social Security And Medicare

If it's not in the Constitution, Sarah Palin won't fund it:

We need to cut these things that aren't constitutionally mandated, that are kind of on the periphery, the fluffery, like NPR and National Endowment for the Arts. Those are obvious.

Save Those Stem Cells!

Having an oncologist in the delivery room with his wife can be interesting. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, told this story about the birth of his first child to NPR's Terry Gross on Nov. 17:

I'm trying to cut the umbilical cord, but on the flipside of my mind, it's almost a split of my right brain and my left brain, and here I am in sort of the most glorious moment of my life, the birth of my child, and on one side of my brain I'm saying to myself, I have got to harvest her umbilical cord blood cells because these cells are useful in transplantations for kids who have leukemia....

[T]he tragedy of it [is that the umbilical cord is] often flushed down the sink and often not collected all. I think, you know, we absolutely need to have better centralized banking facilities free of charge which allow us to bank these cells because kids with leukemia can benefit from cord blood transplantation and they need these - these are very precious cells....

[T]hey contain blood-forming stem cells that can go into the blood and create new blood. And they are so precious because they can be transplanted into another child and give rise to the blood system of the child and you can therefore eliminate the leukemia. And if you eliminate leukemia you can often eliminate the normal - the child's blood stem cells and you can replace it with the cord blood from another child, and that's why they're incredibly precious.

The fuss over embryonic stem cells has died down since March 2009, when President Obama overturned the Bush administration's ban on the use of federal funds for new stem cells lines. While I favored the Obama policy, it bothered me that, during that lengthy debate, the coloration of being ideological was applied only to the pro-life side. And now we learn that hospitals have been flushing billions upon billions of stem cells down the drain that could help patients immeasurably, and without so much as a peep from either megaphone.

You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

Fox News founder Roger Ailes says NPR executives are Nazis.

A Shot Across The Fox's Nose

Andrew Sullivan is right that Juan Williams' complete statement about Muslims doesn't meet the standard of gross wrenching-out-of-context set by the Obama administration when it panicked and fired Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod. He continues:

The truth is: we can all have bigoted thoughts and say bigoted things because we are human beings, but we should seek to suppress them in a multicultural society within ourselves, let alone lend them actual legitimacy on air. And if you do lend them legitimacy - like Rick Sanchez did and Juan Williams did and Bill O'Reilly did and Brian Kilmeade did - I don't think it's inappropriate for a broadcasting company to say it doesn't want to be associated with it.

And here's another thing. Fox News, on which Williams appears regularly, has openly allied itself with Republicans who believed they could increase their chances on Nov. 2 by whipping up anger against Muslims, which Williams hardly discouraged, and encouraging the idea that Obama isn't Christian. I still don't think that Williams' comments, in the usual scheme of things, justified his being fired. But maybe NPR (which after all has been accused for years of liberal bias, often unfairly) was sending the message that when a news organization really does associate itself explicitly with the fortunes and tactics of a political party, the usual rules don't necessarily apply.

RNPR

The Nixon angle on the Juan Williams firing, as the pundit channels the late Daniel Schorr:

I can only imagine Dan's revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for ten years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines, than Nixon ever displayed.

Bad Juan

I'm a big NPR fan. Firing Juan Williams was a bonehead move. Executives at the taxpayer-subsidized network took what he said out of context in the same way the White House did comments by Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod. President Obama ended up apologizing and offering her another job. NPR should do the same for Williams, who's one of the best (and least-predictable) commentators in the business.