Why does Obama even need to be in the room?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me press you on this, at the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of a grand bargain? That you have tax reform, health care reform, entitlement reform, including Social Security and Medicare where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?

OBAMA: Yes.

Soon after hearing that excerpt, I listened to an NPR report on the Bush press conference and heard the remark that "one-on-one interviews were rare during the administration..."

Gee, how rare would they have been if every journalist dropped to their knees like they do for Obama? The state media's behavior is positively wretched. Whores and drug dealers deserve more respect.

The Obama news conferences tell that story, making one yearn for the return of the always-irritating Sam Donaldson to awaken the slumbering press to the notion that decorum isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The press corps, most of us, don't even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who've been advised they will be called upon that day.

We reporters have earned our own membership in the Bizarro universe.

If the implosion of the newspapers business wasn't enough, self-respect should be all the motivation one needs to take the buy-out package.

Howard Kurtz interviews Jon Mecham of Newsweek and Rick Stengel of Time. Both magazines have been--shall we say--struggling of late. They're strategy for survival is interesting if not a clear hail Mary.

Stengel says his goal is to "make Time lead the conversation, not follow it. To speak stronger with a point of view. To mix more analysis with reporting. Not to ask questions, but to answer them on the cover" -- as with this week's story, "Why Israel Can't Win."

Does that sound like a blog to you? It does to me.

I've always thought it was kind of pompous for some people with doctorates to insist on being called Dr., leaving others to wonder whether they might be able to give medical attention if needed. So I was kind of bugged by the Vice President's wife being constantly referred to as Dr. Jill Biden. Perhaps she prefers the title, or perhaps the MSM has endowed her with it, especially after her spouse disgraced himself during his intro speech in Springfield by referring to her degree as a "problem".

For whatever reason it's there. But I don't remember Lynne Cheney being accorded the same.

Even if it just stopped after the title, David Thompson's Ray Gun Patriarchy would be a great read. Those three words in that configuration just tickle me. I want it to be the name of a band or book or a big metal sign I could hang in my living room or all of the above.

Thompson takes into a Gaurdian columnist called Bidisha for her wandering rant Planet Diversity. And he does it well. Her thesis is that science fiction and fantasy genre novels are a the exclusive province of straight white males writing entirely about straight white males. She defends this point by creating a strangely exhaustive list of non-straight, non-white, non-male authors who have written well-received, if not particularly famous, books.

Before the annointing, these shots used to be the rage among the US press.

The question asked Tuesday in Connecticut was: what caused a chimpanzee to suddenly snap and go on the attack?

Maybe because its a wild animal you dumbasses?

I'm embarrassed to be human.

Why is this a story?

“I believe strongly from my heart that his spirit was never released,” Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, 61, told reporters Tuesday at the National Press Club.

The allegation is that the skull in the glass case at the infamous Skull & Bones fraternity at Yale, isn't just called Geronimo, it actually is Geronimo's.

This is "bat-faced boy" stuff, but apparently taken seriously by the National Press Club and the New York Times. What gives?

Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush — father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush — broke into the grave with some classmates during World War I and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb.

OK, now I get it. The evil Bushes did the dirty deed.

Rupert Murdoch sees current events as an inflection point in history, after which nothing will be the same.

"We are in the midst of a phase of history in which nations will be redefined and their futures fundamentally altered."

..and he's acting on that bet.

"Many people will be under extreme pressure and many companies mortally wounded," Murdoch declared.

"Our competitors will be sorely tempted to take the easy beat, to reduce quality in the search for immediate dividends."

He continued: "Let me be very clear about our company: where others might step back from their commitment to their viewers, their users, readers and customers – we will renew ours.

"The direction of the business now and over the next few years will define the character of our company for decades."

You can see it in Fox News. While the other news media are dutifully acting as adjuncts to the White House press office, Fox is bringing up a lot of inconvenient truths these days--almost like they are reporting on another country. Effectively, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN are betting on success and Newscorp is betting on failure.

Ask yourself who has been making better book over the past 40 years?

Reporting on the Government's inadvertant release of confidential civilian nuclear programs, the New York Times hilariously interviews an expert in the field of mishandling Government secrets:

“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former Director of Central Intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.” (emphasis added)

William Broad's piece, however, failed to mention John Deutch's credentials:

The Defense Department secrets that John M. Deutch, the former Pentagon official and director of central intelligence, kept on his unsecured home computer apparently did not fall into the wrong hands, the government said in a review made public today.

Of course to Mr. Deutch, his willful violation of National Security Laws is only a screw-up (that - 'whew' - doesn't go further than the release of civilian nuclear secrets). Lower ranking people in the Defense Department would have been prosecuted; Deutch got one of Bill Clinton's pre-emptive pardens.

Will the NYT next seek Sandy Berger's opinion on protecting secrets?

Of The New York Times hardback, non-fiction bestseller list, numbers 1,3,4,5,7 are by conservatives. There are no liberal books in the top 15. Glenn Beck is top of the paperback list. H/t Hotair.

Who wrote this?

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

Answer.

And who's less than thrilled?

And mordant satire, no less, as the Chinese premier adopts a position familiar to Saturday Night Live:

So, what is going on? Dowd, Matthews, Saturday Night Live are liberal curs, but they are curs even before they are liberal and they can tell when the wind has turned and they can turn with the wind:

Newsweek sold 62,000 newstand copies in the last six months of 2009.

That is coincidentally, the same number of unique visitors we've had to Anatreptic over the same period.

Newstand sales are generally the most reliable indicator of a magazine's health, because the reflect an act of will by a reader. Subscriptions are so inexpensive (and often free), that its not reasonable to infer a relationship between the subscription and actual reading of the magazine.

TV Guide magazine sold for one dollar. What do you think Newsweek will fetch after another year or two of 40 point drops in single-copy sales?

There has been a lot of stories recently, chronicling the long fall of the White House press corps from arbiter of public opinion to simpering catamites. The odd aspect of these stories is that they are coming from nominally left-wing media types writing for overtly left-wing media institutions.

I put it down to the progressives learning--as usual--what has been obvious to everyone else for a very long time. It seems to have dawned on them only very recently that they may have gone a little overboard in schlepping their puff-pieces and ignoring solidly researched information on who Obama was before he stepped into the national arena.

Too late. Nobody listens to you anymore, except Washington Tikritis whose financial and career fates depend on a perpetuation of the regime.

For as long as there has been a White House, a healthy tension has existed between the president, who seeks to convince the citizenry with calibrated messages and images, and the middlemen of the Fourth Estate, who traditionally convey, interpret, rebut, deride, and otherwise filter those messages and images. Every so often, the president takes his revenge, as Obama did on Friday, mocking skeptical reporters who have been questioning the positive impact of health-care reform. "Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm and you planted some seeds and they came out next day and they looked—Nothing’s happened! There’s no crop! We’re gonna starve! Oh, no! It’s a disaster!" Obama told a town meeting in Maine. “It’s been a week, folks. So before we find out if people like health-care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place. Just a thought.”

Until relatively recently, middlemen like Plante had the upper hand, and the media filter was robust—notwithstanding persistent and clever attempts by various White House communications gurus to bypass the journalistic kibitzing. But these days, as Plante acknowledges, the filter is fraying.

And the MSM’s relevance is up for grabs.

Still in denial I see.

What is so fascinating about this is that even as reality sticks its nose into the Progressive tent, they still have no idea is a bloody camel! Obama sidesteps the press corps to talk directly to the people, and they don't give a damn about what he has to say. In my earlier post, I pointed out that public opinion on health care hasn't budged a point since it passed, underscoring how thorough the polarization of the electorate has been. Obama has been insulting me and my 'ilk' since he first stepped into the primaries, and he has only escalated his rhetoric.

Anyone who has dared to voice an objection has been subject to a thorough course of verbal abuse, usually with a liberal application (pun intended) of their favorite spanking-switch--racism.

What possible chance does he have to get a hearing from Americans so ill-treated?

I personally turn the channel whenever I see him. Although some won't believe me, this isn't because I'm petty, but rather because I just don't like being lied, lectured and condescended to, and I know for a fact I am far, far from alone. The Obama regime has seemingly accomplished the impossible--they have reached over the media to directly alienate the electorate. This is a whole new level of the politics of division game.

As the political sages recommend, when your opponent is determined to destroy himself, its best to get out of the way. On the other hand, there is something important for conservatives and libertarians and moderate Democrats to learn from this slow motion train wreck--treat those who disagree with you with respect, so that the door at least remains open for a future opportunity at persuasion and common cause.

I attended last week's Tea Party rally at the Salt Lake City Federal building. The top photo is one I took of a couple standing next to me. The photo on the bottom is one my local paper, the Deseret News used on their front page the next day (see photo 4 in the on-line article). It seems to me the DesNews had opportunity to take a better shot, as evidenced by the shot I took. Perhaps the photographer or editor wanted a more unobstructed view of the period costumes, but this unflattering pose was the best they could do?

The BBC is rotten with smug assholes like this:

Yesterday was a party for Newsweek and the liberal media. Sidney Harman, 91 and rich as Croesus, bought the ailing magazine out of passion if not avarice.

Today, the Daily Beast reveals that he bought it for exactly one dollar.

...make no mistake, Harman's pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn't a financial one. The Daily Beast has obtained a copy of the 66-page sales memorandum that the Newsweek seller, the Washington Post Co., gave to prospective buyers, and it paints a picture of a media property given to someone unequipped to fundamentally change the current trajectory.

Harman's goal is to break-even by 2013, which should scare Newsweek staffers all by itself, because the only reasonable possibility of doing that is cutting the expenses to the bone.

Dig deeper into the document and the numbers get worse. Newsweek lost money in all three of its core areas in 2008 and 2009: U.S. publishing, foreign publishing and digital. Even with the smaller guaranteed circulation, it still retains $40 million in subscription liabilities owed to readers. And then there's Newsweek's lease foibles: last year, it paid $13 million in rent, a startling figure for a company of its size.

Its seems likely that Newsweek's high-profile journalists will seek safe haven with whatever liberal-left media property that is still standing, leaving an empty shell, and perhaps that is the ultimate goal. The name means something, but the old way of doing business is toast. It seems to me that the best outcome would be for Newsweek to rise Phoenix-like from the ashes as a much smaller, more aggressive and more relevant on-line entity along the lines of Politico.