SmartRemarks

And no one told me when to run… that’s for damn sure.

New Year’s came and went without me writing a blog post. I was preoccupied with other things at the time, as detailed to some extent in my last couple of entries bookending my computer headaches. But I did make some observations that I think are still worth mentioning, as both the year and the decade rolled over and restarted.

I’m well aware, of course, that both our calendar year and the decades into which we assemble them are completely arbitrary human constructs, and that there’s nothing metaphysically significant about the transition from one random chronological marker to another, despite all the cultural baggage we attach to them. Nevertheless, one of the central components of human consciousness is our capability for pattern recognition, and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century definitely displayed some patterns that are, at the very least, psychologically meaningful.

To put it all in a nutshell… this past decade sucked. Big time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 2009, 2010, climate, George W. Bush, government, internet, journalism, Mark Morford, media, Obama, progress, the future

The Chicago Reader is a local institution. It dates back to 1971, one of the oldest free weekly papers in the country (preceded by the Village Voice and perhaps one or two others). And it’s been near and dear to my heart since I first moved to Chicago in the mid ’80s. It always provided a reliable weekly dose of irreverent local commentary and, more importantly, it was the clearinghouse for information on what was going on around town where and when, and whether it was worth your attention.

Then, two years ago, it was sold to Tampa’s Creative Loafing media company. It’s been downhill ever since.

Yesterday, after a lengthy court battle, the Reader changed ownership again… in bankruptcy court. And what happens next… is anybody’s guess.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Chicago, Chicago Reader, internet, journalism, media

Chuck Todd is the White House correspondent for NBC News. He is, frankly, one of the smartest political analysts on network TV—certainly he was among the best covering last year’s elections.

And yet… events this week make it clear that Chuck Todd has no faith in the American justice system, has no confidence in the democratic process, and doesn’t even trust mass-media journalism—his own profession—to do anything for public discourse other than debase it. Apparently even a top-level practitioner of the Beltway media establishment still can’t help but embody its worst systemic flaws.

This all arose when Chuck was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday discussing AG Eric Holder’s possible appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Bush administration war crimes (as I wrote about here). Salon’s Glenn Greenwald jumped all over Chuck’s casually dismissive remarks about the idea, and Chuck (to his credit) agreed to a detailed interview with Glenn. The results were very revealing, and very discouraging.

Here are excerpts (all emphases mine) from what Chuck said on Tuesday…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Chuck Todd, DOJ, Eric Holder, Glenn Greenwald, John Yoo, journalism, media, torture

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

If anyone wonders how (A) a nation can move step-by-step down the path toward fascism, or (B) why the mainstream press in this country is held in such increasingly dismal regard, this week’s cover story in Newsweek provides a searing case study.

Co-authors Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas—both award-winning, Ivy League-educated journalists who move in the highest circles of academia, media, and politics; IOW, the very definition of establishment credibility—have decided that one of the key issues facing the incoming Obama administration, when confronting the boundaries of presidential power, is (as the cover blurb puts it), “What Would Dick [Cheney] Do?”

And Editor-in-Chief Jon Meacham—he who recently resuscitated the meme that “America is a center-right country”—heartily endorses this angle, writing inside the magazine that the cover feature addresses how “the urgent question now is whether President Obama will hew to [the anti-Cheney] dogma or whether, confronted with the realities of office, he will begin to see virtue in the antiterror apparatus Cheney helped Bush create.”

This, in the aftermath of an election that decisively and unequivocally repudiated the disastrous policies of Bush and Cheney—even Bush himself used the word “repudiated” in his semi-self-aware press conference today!—is what our establishment media wants us thinking about.

Where does one begin?

Well, with getting one’s gorge to subside. But after that…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Constitution, Dick Cheney, fascism, FISA, George W. Bush, journalism, media, Obama, Rachel Maddow

A completely subjective list, of course. But what the hell… aren’t they all?

Going in to 2008, one could hardly open a magazine or flip a channel without hitting a media comparison to 1968. It was 40 years ago (a nice, round number), and it was a paradigm-shifting political year that looked familiar, with an open competition for the presidential nomination in both parties, all while a war was on overseas.

As it turned out, 2008 was a momentous year in its own right, arguably the most significant year in decades, and without question one we will all remember vividly. But it was not assassinations and riots that made its mark in the history books, unlike in 1968; it brought distinctive events all its own.

There’s not really a lot of room for debate over the two most significant news events of the year, and the annual AP survey of news editors corresponds with what almost all of us would surely conclude on our own, a point-counterpoint of encouraging and discouraging developments:

1) The presidential election of Barack Obama

I’ve already written quite a bit about this one, of course… but suffice it to say that it’s historic for the fact that he’ll be the first African-American president; it’s historic for the fact that he won with a (generally) upbeat, honorable, serious campaign; and it’s historic in that it marks a realignment back toward progressive politics after a generation of destructive radical conservatism, and after eight years of arguably the single worst president in American history. How Obama really performs in office of course remains to be seen, but what he’s accomplished so far this year stands on its own.

2) The worst economic meltdown in our lifetimes

Written more than a little about this, too, of course. It seems almost quaint now to recall that when I started this blog, back in mid-September—although we now know that we were already nine months into a recession—it was still possible to ask “how bad is the economy?” and wonder if it would still get worse. Within days, everything started to go to hell in a handbasket… in a way that seems to have created a destructive feedback loop, where every new development just exacerbates what came before. Homes foreclosing, jobs disappearing, businesses (and entire industries) collapsing, credit freezing, investments evaporating… we’ll remember this for a long time, no matter how much we might prefer to forget it.

After that, the choices grow more arguable. My assessment:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Blagojevich, Chicago, climate, Congress, economy, Election 2008, financial crisis, FISA, history, Illinois, international, iPhone, journalism, Madoff, media, Obama, Top 10 lists

Collapsing industries are hardly an unusual thing this year. Real estate, banking, airlines, automobiles, music and more are all in dire straits. One of the most consequential ones, however, with ripple effects that will last far beyond the pain of this current economic downturn, is the death spiral of the newspaper business.

For some years now, even when economic times were better,a common question in public discourse was “will print journalism be able to survive the challenge of the internet?” 2008 was the year the answer became a painfully clear “no,” and the question shifted to “how long before print journalism gives up the ghost?” Indeed, one of the biggest news stories of the year was, ironically, the death spiral of the industry responsible for coving big news stories.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, economy, Humanities Festival, internet, journalism, media, newspapers