Altercation

Slacker Friday

By Eric Alterman

They call this "Journalism?"

I've got a new Think Again column called "The Truth about Conservative 'Journalism'" here . It's about the antics of Mr. O'Keefe et al.

I did not use this piece to get into the crazy interview that Breitbart gave npr.org. Peter Ames Carlin reminded me, in the letters column to Romenesko of just how silly it was. But this quote: "They want to control the narrative," Breitbart says. "I'm saying, 'No more!' The new media has freed it up. I'm sorry, mainstream media. It's over. Your ability to control the narrative is over." Well, it's just so funny. I mean what does he think is going to replace it? Him? Crazy people dressed as pimps and hookers and telephone repairmen?

Also this one: "MSNBC and The Washington Post, you know, go nuts trying to grant terrorists at a time of war all of the rights under the world, while James O'Keefe gets arrested ... and they're already framing him." Really? In what universe? It strikes me that the Post, at least, is falling all over itself to embrace O'Keefe and Breitbart's nutcase view of the world, at least until they were forced to accept its logical conclusion. Read the whole amazing thing if you want a laugh. It just goes on and on...

And that's all we have today, now here's Sal on Bowie.

Alter-reviews:

Sal on David Bowie:
DAVID BOWIE-A REALITY TOUR

I've made no secret of my love for Bowie's most recent output. "Earthling," "Hours," "Heathen" and "Reality" released in 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2003 respectively, offer songs that stand up to anything Bowie has put out in his long career. I'm convinced most people have never even listened to these records, yet still manage to dismiss them as unworthy. On this live set, which is essentially the audio portion of the DVD of the same name, wonderfully remastered for CD, Bowie and his band run through songs from these records, as well as some chestnuts and rarities, over two nights in Dublin. With setlists running from 30 to 35 songs, the shows on this tour were some of the longest of Bowie's career.

While the aforementioned records might have suffered just a bit from over-production, the songs performed live, rocked nicely. Bowie's band, which features longtime members Earl Slick on guitar and Mike Garson on keyboards, as well as one of the best drummers out there, Sterling Campbell, really wraps itself around some of the more familiar material like "Fame" and "Heroes," breathing new life into what you've heard so many times before, and seems to really have some fun on some of the songs that are not played so often, like the Iggy/Bowie-penned classic "Sister Midnight" (a highlight here) and "Fantastic Voyage" from 1978's "Lodger."

Here's my one complaint---you knew I had to have one---this set features 33 songs culled from the two nights in Dublin, 30 of which appeared on the DVD I mentioned earlier. The three "bonus" tracks are tacked on at the end of Disc Two. Wouldn't it have been nice to have sequenced them in their original running order of the set? Am I being an asshole? On top of that, two more additional tracks, which would then represent every song played on those two nights in Dublin, are iTunes exclusives. This is extremely frustrating for the people who still shell out money for CDs. At a time when CD sales are down 688 percent, this seems like a missed opportunity for the loyal Bowie fans. I mean, who else is buying this set? (Maybe I am being an asshole, but that's what I would have done.)

CD BONUS TRACKS
Fall Dog Bombs The Moon
Breaking Glass
China Girl

ITUNES BONUS TRACKS
5:15-The Angels Have Gone
Days

SAL NUNZIATO
BURNING WOOD

Charles Pierce

Newton, MA.

Hey Doc: "William Blake and the eternals/and the Sisters of Mercy/lookin' for the Veedon Fleece." Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Party Girl" (Gravy) -- I see Darren Sharper going 50 yards the other way with an interception, and every step he takes is a tribute to how much I love New Orleans.

Short Takes:

Part The First:
As though there weren't enough reasons to hope that the Big Honking Football Game Sunday geauxs the right way, there's now Scott Fujita. One of the basic problems with being a civil libertarian always has been that we never have enough linebackers.

Part The Second:
Something like 40 percent of the self-identified union households that voted in the Massachusetts special senatorial election voted for Scott Brown, who this week changed his mind and demanded to be sworn in as quickly as possible so as to help derail a pro-labor nominee to the NLRB. Barnum was an optimist. There are apparently several thousand born every minute.

Part The Third:
Personally, I think Democratic politics would have been infinitely better had Rahm Emanuel gone into representing D-list TV-movie actors, but this has to be one of the most senseless controversies since the last time someone put Gennifer Flowers on television. People, you are responding to Sarah Palin here, and she is a marginal political figure at best. That this thing lasted longer than 15 minutes in the news cycle is an embarrassment.

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February 5, 2010

Slacker Sunday

By Eric Alterman

I did a "Think Again" column about the Supreme Court decision on campaign spending called "Court Disposes, Media Yawn" and that's here.

And here's my Nation column on Game Change.

And here's Charles.

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February 1, 2010

Slacker Thursday

By Eric Alterman

I did a "Think Again" column about the Supreme Court decision on campaign spending called "Cour Disposes, Media Yawn" and that's here.

And here's my Nation column on Game Change.

And here is my discussion last week on Bill Moyers' program with Melissa Harris-Lacewell about Obama's first years.

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January 28, 2010

Slacker Friday

By Eric Alterman

We've got a new "Think Again" column called "Tea Party/Fox Party" about some of the implications of Massachusetts here .

And I don't actually defend John Edwards here on The Daily Beast, but I do wonder exactly what the big deal is.

Finally, I'll be on Bill Moyers' show tonight, which is rebroadcast Sunday night, talking about Obama's first year. They have an excellent website, which is here.

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January 22, 2010

Slacker Thursday

By Eric Alterman

We've got a new "Think Again" column called "Tea Party/Fox Party" about some of the implications of Massachusetts here . This week on Moyers...

Oh look, it's me. Everybody watch...

Faced with the increasing global demand for oil and the threat of climate change, America needs a new energy policy--but what are our options? Bill Moyers sits down with Public Agenda analysts Jean Johnson and Scott Bittle to discuss how we can power America's future and why we should "work the problem" rather than listening to extremes on either side. Johnson and Bittle are the co-authors of Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis. Then, the Journal assesses Obama's first year as President in the wake of Democrats' defeat in Massachusetts' special election for Senate with Princeton politics and African American studies professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell and journalist Eric Alterman.

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January 21, 2010

Slacker Friday

By Eric Alterman

First things first: We've got a new "Think Again" column called "Blame Gitmo" here.

My new Nation column is called "What Would Molly Say?" and that's here.

Also, I keep forgetting to mention this lecture/discussion in honor of Tom Paine I'm doing next week at the Ethical Culture Society in New York, which is naturally free and open to the public. Here's the invitation, (with apologies for the excessive degree of self-promotion, even by Internet standards, but thanks to the Center for Inquiry for the kind words). It will take place Wednesday, January 20 at 7pm at the New York Society for Ethical Culture headquarters:

What Would Tom Paine Think? Liberal Values In Obama's First Year

A special event with Eric Alterman

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January 15, 2010

Slacker Thursday

By Eric Alterman

We've got a new "Think Again" column called "Blame Gitmo" here.

My new Nation column is called "What Would Molly Say?" and that's here.

As I wrote in my previous Altercation this week, devoted to "Game Change," I'm in the Dominican Republic with the ambition of turning 50 in relative privacy. My family and I happen to be staying at the Club Med in Punta Cana, where between 50 and 60 percent of the staff is Haitian. It's morally complicated enough to come to one of these places in the best of times. Now, obviously, the irony is almost unbearable. I've made friends with my tennis instructor, Elie, a great guy, who heard third hand that his family's house was destroyed but that his mother and sister were able to get out. He can't reach them and is understandably desperate to find a way to help them. Instead, however he is giving tennis lessons to wealthy Americans and Europeans. This situation is multiplied many times over and I don't pretend to be able even imagine what it must be like.

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January 14, 2010

You Can Cut the Pressure in 'Game Change' with a Butter Knife

By Eric Alterman

Since my poker buddy John Heilemann was good enough to drop off a copy of his embargoed book, Game Change, on Sunday night and I got picked up by the Carmel car at 5:15 Monday morning to make a 7:50 a.m. flight to Punta Cana, and I read the book for the entire four hour flight, my guess is that it's a safe bet that I was the first person in all of South America to have read its first 200 pages, and certainly the only one to report back to you all on it.

Well?

It's kind of like crack. I am a fan of Heilemann's writing and reporting, though not quite in sufficient quantities to offset how much of an unfan I am of Mark Halperin, his co-author. But while the pair have not been able to shake off the kind of clichés that made Halperin almost unreadable in the past--"like a ton of bricks to their psychic solar plexus" occurs within about a page of "John Kerry was saddled with more baggage than a curbside porter at Dulles airport," Heilemann, a former New Yorker staff writer has clearly massaged this prose so that nobody needs to be embarrassed about having his or her name on it. (Interestingly, and undoubtedly significantly, Heilemann's name precedes Halperin's on the cover, though alphabetically, it should be the other way around.)

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January 12, 2010

Slacker Friday

By Eric Alterman

I've got a new "Think Again" column called "Money for Nothing" and it's here

This month's Moment column, on Jewish McCarthyism, is here

My idea of a good movie: "One more thought. If you've been looking for a film whose hero uses the subjunctive frequently and correctly, 'Youth in Revolt' is it." (from the WSJ) Just saying.

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January 8, 2010

Closing Time

By Eric Alterman

I've got a new "Think Again" column called "Money for Nothing" and it's here

If you read this article in the Forward, you'll see that every single leader of every major Jewish organization has chosen to side with the government of Israel over the representative of their own government when it comes to the government of Israel's right to attack American Jewish organizations. This is not surprising, but it is disturbing, to nothing of revealing. And were this any other country, it would be impossible. Here is the key quote: Alan Solow, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, issued a statement praising Oren and criticizing Rosenthal: "As an official of the United States government, it is inappropriate for the anti-Semitism envoy to be expressing her personal views on the positions Ambassador Oren has taken as well as on the subject of who needs to be heard from in the Jewish community." Really? Who appointed Solow Pope of the Jews?

I wrote a column about a similar controversy in Moment this month here I actually don't like the title of this column. It's not really about J Street, it's about the insistence by Abe Foxman, et al that American Jews have no right to free speech should their views disagree with those of the Israeli government. It's about Jewish McCarthyism, whether one agrees with J Street or not. (And Oh, look, here is the root of my anti-Palin animus. Who'd a thunk it?)

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January 7, 2010