The Notion

Limbaugh's Many Hats and Excuses

By Leslie Savan

If there's one thing the last two weeks have proved it's that it doesn't matter whether you're a politician, journalist, or a media pundit, when it comes to personal indiscretions you want to be judged as an entertainer.

Republicans have long called Rush Limbaugh "just an entertainer" whenever they wanted to distance themselves from one of his embarrassing rightwing radio rants, as if that somehow put him beyond the pale of political judgment. But as the communications industry has bulldozed the boundaries imposed on different professions, folks are trying more and more to exercise the rights of one role while they are personally judged by the standards of another.

Limbaugh, especially now that he's desperate to rehab his image as a racist in order to purchase the St. Louis Rams, is a case in point. By the Boy Scout standards we pretend to apply to politicians in this country, the thrice divorced, oxycontin-addicted Limbaugh shouldn't be able to run for dog catcher. Yet here he is, sitting for a sympathetic, two-part interview with Today Show correspondent Jamie Gangel that NBC injected into every MSNBC news show as if it were an exclusive with a head of state. Can Rush say anything good about what Obama's done? Is he the head of the Republican party? Who are his "picks" for the next GOP presidential candidate?

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October 14, 2009

Progressives, Bloggers Make GQ’s New Washington Power List

By Ari Melber

GQ released its much anticipated "Power 50" list on Tuesday, the first compendium of Washington's most influential players in the Obama era, with a PR blitz and a glitzy Washington cocktail party celebrating the magazine's November issue. The rankings are sure to excite and roil the Beltway, where the score is often more important than the game, and in a nod to Change, this list is actually studded with some progressive and new media figures.

The highest-ranking liberal politicians are Nancy Pelosi, David Obey and Henry Waxman, who each made the top ten, followed by Eric Holder, Barney Frank and Carol Browner.

On the advocacy side, new labor gets a shout out with Andy Stern. Paul Rieckhoff gets props for organizing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. And the New Yorker's Jane Mayer is credited for not only informing U.S. "detention policies," but also pushing President Obama to "release the torture memos."

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October 13, 2009

Geithner's All Ears for the Debt Cartel

By Laura Flanders

Months ago, a former chief economist at the IMF called it mind control. Talking to Simon Johnson of the Atlantic Monthly, he explained that one of the most alarming truths laid bare by the economic crash was that the finance industry had effectively captured the thinking of government.

"That's going too far," said reasonable people. "This is no Banana Republic run by crony cartels."

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October 13, 2009

New White House Line Against Fox: It's War

By Ari Melber

The White House's battle with Fox News reached a new high on Sunday, when Communications Director Anita Dunn went on national television to blast Fox as a partisan organization that functions as an appendage to the Republican Party.

"Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party," Dunn told CNN, adding, "let's not pretend [Fox is] a news organization like CNN is." Dunn also took her beef to The New York Times, saying in a Sunday interview that Fox is "undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House [and] we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

In the most significant exchange on CNN, Dunn stressed that President Obama now personally views Fox as a partisan opponent, rather than a journalistic organization. "When he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point," she explained, "he is going on it to debate the opposition."

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October 11, 2009

Did Obama Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

My reaction to Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize elicited some decidedly "un-peaceful" responses from my friends and followers on social networking and blog sites.

As readers here at The Notion can attest -whether with glee or disdain-I have been an ardent supporter of President Obama. Despite some disagreements, I have urged the left to view this administration as an opportunity for genuine change and to regard it as friendly to progressive aims. But my response to the Nobel Peace Prize announcement was not particularly celebratory.

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October 10, 2009

Joe Tells Rush Who Wears the Rants in This Party

By Leslie Savan

The good folks on the set of Morning Joe spent Friday morning dodging prairie oysters flung by the host at rival Rush Limbaugh, who had called Joe Scarborough a "neutered, chickified moderate." Rush had simply been trying to geld another Republican who dared criticize him, but this time Scarborough gelded back and it was not a pretty sight.

It all started earlier this week, when Scarborough ripped Rush for going "off the deep end" by jiggling with glee over Obama's failure to win the 2016 Olympics for Chicago.

No forgiver of lese-majeste, Limbaugh hit back Thursday at Joe and "PMSNBC":

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October 9, 2009

Kristof's Modest Proposal

By Eyal Press

Nicholas Kristof had a fine proposal in his column yesterday: if Congress fails to pass health care reform by the end of the year, he argued, its members should agree to become true representatives of the American people. Legislators should "surrender health insurance in proportion with the American population that is uninsured."

Under this formula, 15 percent of Senators and Representatives (and their families) would get no coverage. Another 8 percent would get inadequate coverage. For those who argue extending coverage to more people is too expensive, "here's their chance to save government dollars in keeping with their own priorities."

Big deal, some will say (though I suspect no members of Congress would dare say this): so a few legislators would have to make their way to emergency rooms for treatment. The government's role should be to protect Americans from lethal threats – terrorism, hostile states – and nothing else. Yet it turns out that America's health care system is a lethal threat. Kristof's column linked to this recently published Harvard study, which found that lack of access to medical insurance causes nearly 45,000 excess deaths every year.

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October 9, 2009

The Aspirational Nobel

By Richard Kim

I woke up, read the New York Times website and thought I had come to the Onion instead. I hit refresh. Still there: "Obama Wins Nobel for Diplomacy." Maybe this is one of my weird work-related dreams, I thought. Maybe I am still drunk from last night's party. Better close my eyes and wake up again in the real world. Five minutes later...and still no dice.

Yes, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. My first reaction is that this is going to be a test of how much crazier Orly Taitz and the Republican Anti-Christers can get. Not only does this prove that Obama is a socialist svengali--because he got the Norwegians to vote for him, probably as part of some UN-takeover of America--it also proves that Obama is piggy. Anti-Christs are so like that; they want everything right now (and losing the 2016 Olympics was just a red herring).

But back in reality, I'm still a little bewildered. It's as if the Nobel Committee gave Obama the award for behaving like a normal American president, instead of like a clueless corrupt cowboy.

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October 9, 2009

Greece Votes Socialist

By Maria Margaronis

Going against the European grain, Greece has voted George Papandreou's center-left PaSoK party to power in a landslide. Promising a new political culture, an end to cronyism and a 3 billion euro stimulus package for the economy, the president of the Socialist International has at last won the job that was held by his father and grandfather before him. But despite being to the manor born, Papandreou is neither a lightweight nor a populist demagogue in the style of his father, Andreas, who took such pains to be a thorn in Ronald Reagan's side. Mild-mannered, thoughtful, modest, he is a new Papandreou for the age of Obama: an American-born, European social democrat with a green conscience and a commitment to markets as well as democracy.

Nor is his victory a sign that Europe is leaning left: witness Angela Merkel's recent triumph in Germany. It is a local phenomenon, the product of Greece's recent political history. PaSoK lost power to the conservative New Democracy in 2004 after eleven years in office, during which it squeezed Greece into the Eurozone, put through a patchwork program of modernizing reforms, mended relations with Turkey, staged a grand (and exorbitant) Olympic Games, and became a byword for paybacks and corruption. New Democracy's Kostas Karamanlis (also a scion of an old political dynasty) took over with a promise to clean out the Augean stables.

But New Democracy's carryings-on made PaSoK's scandals look like minor pecadilloes. Overpriced government bonds were sold to state pension funds; cabinet ministers dreamed up lucrative property scams with abbots from Mount Athos. On Karamanlis's watch, vast tracts of the country literally went up in flames; the fire service, weakened by political interference, did too little much too late, and the promised restoration of forests, farms and villages fell victim to the usual toxic mixture of incompetence and graft. For a few days last December, violence in Athens gripped the world's TV cameras. The shooting of a 15-year old boy by a trigger-happy policeman seemed to sum up the state's indifference to a whole generation; broken promises were repaid with smashed shop windows and hopelessness with rioting in the streets.

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October 5, 2009

When Pundits Attack: The Beck-Brooks Fight

By Ari Melber

Perhaps we still do not understand the current Obama backlash.

David Brooks caused a small stir on Friday by arguing that conservative radio hosts are, paradoxically, a lot like well-behaved children. They are seen – splashed across magazine covers and endlessly profiled – but not heard, politically, since they do not swing elections.

"The talk jocks can't even deliver the conservative voters who show up at Republican primaries," Brooks observed, reminiscing about how McCain's media detractors could not stop him in South Carolina last year.

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October 5, 2009