Today's business mode at a newspaper's checkout counter

Adding a lighter touch to the darker side of the upheaval of ownership at today's newspapers, Daily Kos posted Jimmy Fallon's  insightful take on the recent  transaction at the Washington Post:

"Jeff Bezos, the CEO if Amazon.com, bought the Washington Post for $250 million.  He just walked into the Post's headquarters and said: 'Add to the cart.'"

Mitt won, but Barack made it worse

ln case you've been busy with the week-old leftovers from Thanksgiving, I should inform  you that  after deep reflection, the vanquished Republicans have now decided  that they won the November election.   It didn't really go into the history books that way, of course, because  the Obama Machine didn't play fair in its socialistic, fraudulent attempt  to  give every voter "stuff".   Cheating was particularly true in a crucial Ohio County (Wood) where Obama got 108 pct. of the vote.  Not even PolitiFact/Ohio could convince the crazy people that their math had gone awry.  The county was so important to the subversive  scheme  that the scandal became a perfect fit for  Aesop.

Now Mitt Romney's chief campaign advisor, Stuart Stevens  has raised a helluva brouhaha by pouring  more gasoline on Fox News' fire breathers insisting ...I want to be sure I have this right ...that  the final election count betrays what would amount to a moral victory  for the ex-governor.

In an Op-Ed column in the Washington Post this week, Stevens argued,

"In the debates and in sweeping [!] rallies across the country, Romney captured the imagination of millions of Americans.  He spoke for those who felt disconnected from the Obama vision of America.  He handled the unequaled[!]  pressures of a campaign with a natural grace and good humor that contrasted sharply with the angry  bitterness of his critics."

( Stevens didn't mention it,  but Romney also sang "America" off-key with the same tone deafness  in which he ignored the rising voices of those groups who were dead set on votitng against him.)

But about that 3.5 million popular vote Obama victory margin.

Undaunted by mere numbers, Stevens characterized the outcome as a moral victory for Mitt because he captured a majority of voters  who earn more than $50,,000 a year - as opposed to, well,  let's not go into that.

If Stevens had any regrets about the campaign, it was simply that the Romney side  got the message too late to reach out to the various subgroups of  the white guys.   Which I guess you might ask, what took them so long?

Still, Stevens concluded that the race came down to

 "Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas.  It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom.  And Republican ideals - Mitt Romney carried the day.

  "On Nov. 6, that wasn't enough to win.  But it was enough to make us proud and to build on the future."

Stevens is a film writer and ardent athletic adventurer who is said to have once skied the final 100 miles to the North Pole.  But in acrobatically declaring that Romney was a veritable winner who fought for the essential core of America, he may have been inspired by Sen. Henry Clay, who gave us the historic line:

"I'd rather be right than president."

Clay, a failed presidential candidate himself,  was referring to his abolitionist views on slavery.

Unlike Clay, there were times when it was impossible to know what Mitt was talking about.

The same can be said about his man Stuart Stevens.

Mitt emerging as the true 47 percenter

As if Mitt Romney doesn't have enough bad news about his election loss,  his historic   47 pct. notion about the folks who would never vote for him is returning to haunt him in reverse.  According to the Washington Post,  when the final votes are finally tallied, President Obama will likely receive 51 pct. and Mitt...47 pct.  Writer Greg Sargent is relying on a projection by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Writes Sargent:  "At risk of piling on,  a 47 pct. finish would represent a perfect conclusion to the Romney political saga. If Romney ran a campaign of unprecedented  dishonesty and lack of transparency, virtually all of it was geared towards misleading  people about the true nature of his - and his party's - actual beliefs and governing agenda.

I'd say that 51 pct. of the voters would agree with that assessment.

Gerson is looking at Mitt from our side

And now, the latest from former Bush chief speech writer and Wash Post columnist Michael Gerson:

"Yet a Republican ideology pitting the “makers” against the “takers”
offers nothing. No sympathy for our fellow citizens. No insight into
our social challenge. No hope of change. This approach involves a
relentless reductionism. Human worth is reduced to economic
production. Social problems are reduced to personal vices. Politics is
reduced to class warfare on behalf of the upper class. "


(When conservatives write things like that, I can take the day off!!)

Murdoch's media friends circle the wagons

WELL, THE ANTICIPATED rush to circle the wagons around Rupert Murdock is now in full throttle, from Rudy Giuiani to CNN host Piers Morgan to the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and, of course, Fox News. As mayor, Giuliani had been in Murdock's protective custody; Morgan had been the editor of Murdock's now-shuttered tabloid, News of the World, and later the Sun. In an astonishingly servile editorial, even for a paper owned by Murdock, the WSJ suggested that most of the boss's problems are caused by his critics. The common theme in many of these defense arguments: He is an honorable man and should not be subjected to a "witch hunt". Murdoch the victim?

Thanks to this fulsome scandal, we are learning something new about modern journalism every day. The Washington Post, for example, hissed that Britain's tough libel laws had forced the media to engage in hacking and other forms of antisocial misbehavior. Wow! Would you believe Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli had been an editor at the Wall Street Journal under Murdoch? Since Brauchli's arrival at the Post the once-liberal paper has taken some mystifying editorial positions, but none more obtuse than its defense of Rupert Murdoch.

Sometimes, pedigree is everything in the news business.,

Once again with feeling: Liberal Media!

WHAT WAS THAT? Did I just hear another snarky reference to the...eh, liberal media? Alas, it is one of those mossy idiomatic terms that is a convenient escape hatch for folks who can generally be expected to denounce, slander and/or vilify the aforementioned media that they haven't read in ages. They do so with such ease that it is useless to respond that much of the mainstream media is owned by corporate power brokers not far removed from Wall Street. The owners aren't the sort of people that you would expect to be pushing a cart on Saturday mornings at the local supermarket, if you know what I mean. And they have a way of supporting the Republican candidate.

But why limit the discussion to the print media? Take the recent study by FAIR magazine, a liberal publication that describes itself as the "media watch group" that targets the New York Times as well as any other print or broadcast voice that has slipped up on such news stories as, say, the American invasion of Iraq. ( It wasn't the only "liberal" editorial voice that servilely followed George Bush into the swamp on that story!)

FAIR reported that six of the biggest media companies (including the leftist Fox News, New York Times and Washington Post) had interlocking directorates with pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. In a survey of how the big corporate media covered the health care issue, FAIR observed:

"In the past six months, the Washington Post has published hundreds of articles on the subject of healthcare reform, fewer than 25% of which mention single-payer. Fewer than 30 percent of the sources who spoke about single-payer in those articles were advocates of the plan."

The same retreat from single-payer advocates appeared in the other mainstream media, including the networks. Although FAIR concluded that the interlocking directorates didn't necessarily lead to the lopsided reporting of the issue, it did indicate "at the very least, corporate media and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' interests are fundamentally aligned." There is reason to believe it.

A greater threat to the performance of the media these days is its struggle for survival that has shaped its mission to be inoffensive and less intrusive into what it assumes to be the public's intolerance of anything beyond garden variety news dispatches. The networks' evening news shows are 22-minute recaps (with film, of course, and friendly reminders to the audience that "We're here for you!" ) of whatever might be sorrowfully noteworthy in the world. There is seldom an attempt to explore a complex issue beyond a couple of minutes. Seldom, too, is an effort to correct misinformation by political celebrities and their flaks. The medium simply doesn't permit it, and there are obviously moments when the interviewer doesn't know that he/she and the audience are being taken as fools. And when the collegial pundits take over on Sunday mornings, they offer no more than the same George-Will-like analysis that there is no such thing as climate change. Are you there, Cokie?

The final degradation of national media occurred twice in one week, with Time's doting cover story of Glenn Beck and Jay Leno's hunt for audience inflation by interviewing guest Rush Limbaugh. (Limbaugh needs another rostrum?) Leno should have stuck to standup comedy. Rushbo was all over him with such insights as "Medicare doesn't work" and "Social Security doesn't work." It's interesting to me that Limbaugh could pass honest judgment on two essential government programs that a multimillionaire of his resources will never need anyway.

It's during moments like this that I decide to give Chaucer's Canterbury Tales another shot in hopes that it will be easier to comprehend than what's happening in those liberal media today.

As we have been saying....

Here's a quote sent by a Grumpy Abe reader from a piece by Steven Pearlstein of the WashPost re: healthcare.

"During the first two days of committee action on his bill, Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, beat back repeated attempts by most of the committee's Republicans to gut provisions that would slow runaway growth in Medicare spending. Republicans want us to believe that they care deeply about the federal deficit and about keeping Medicare from going broke, while at the same time demanding that there should be no cuts in benefits, no cuts in payments to insurers or providers, and no reduction in the utilization of medical services. It was the most craven, cynical, hypocritical performance by a group of elected officials that I can remember, and a good measure of the political, intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Republican leadership in Congress."

A quiet week in Lake Grump-begone

LET'S SEE...Where was I before Time Warner abruptly darkened my Internet screen and cut off the phone service for a week-long ...eh, outage. Well, with apologies to Garrison Keillor, it was a quiet week at Lake Grump-begone. Oh, there were the countless calls to the company demanding Service on Demand instead of Movies on Demand. But it soon became obvious to me that Warner Cable was in charge, not me, and the cable savants would fix the problem whenever they were damned ready.

Meantime, I could only spend the down time wondering whether the Indians would call up another relief pitcher from a sandlot down south and how I could be so obtuse not to appreciate the seismic consequences of Michael Jackson's death. On some days the media coverage far exceeded President Obama's discussions with the Russian front office on nuclear weapons and the worsening war in Afghanistan. It is anybody's guess what horrendous world event would have been able to draw our attention from Neverland.

But the late Mr. Jackson's fullest measure of media coverage did serve as a another glimpse of desperation by newspapers and television to sustain or increase their audiences by whatever it takes regardless of the relative consequence to the world. It has sadly become a truism that for all of their problems, the media's front offices have yet to define journalism as a means of making a profit. And my hunch is that at this late date, they never will. There are not enough Michael Jacksons to advance the media to the next level of professionalism, if indeed that is the medium's sublimated goal.

But I did find more than enough time the past week to follow the perils of Palin. Sarah, that is. Hearing her out on her resignation as the Alaskan governor, I realized that if there was a hidden massage in her rambling comments, I was too unsophisticated to discover it. I did, however, gain a tad of satisfaction by reading some national commentaries that appeared to be as much in the dark as I was. As a blazing-comet political celebrity, Palin has become as much a curiosity as a wannabe national political force.

I could only add to the Palintology that a loopy Alaskan politician with her national aspirations could come along not more than once in a lifetime. For that, we should all be thankful.

* * * * *

Scanning today's Op-Ed columns in the Beacon Journal, I caught up with one that was headlined Sarah Palin, victim of media sexism. It was a lament by Marie Cocco, a Washington Post columnist that strongly traced Palin's problems to a male-dominated media empire. That, to say the least, is a tearful stretch. As a white male writer who has spent 99 pct. of my complaints on incompetent white male politicians, I figure I should be able to say a few unkind things about Palin, too. I'm quite astonished that a national political columnist like Cocco could bring her comments down to such an adolescent level (which, I suppose, exposes me to being a sexist re Cocco.) Ms. Cocco, the same rules apply to anybody stumbling up the tower in the political arena which includes Mark Sanford, John Ensign, etc. etc. etc. And if Helen Thomas or Maureen Dowd decide that George Bush is a adrift, I would hesitate to blame it on sexism.

Sarah Palin happens to be a woman. She also happens to have said and done a lot of foolish things. And I am a male who happens to think she is fair game.

Folks, it's good to be back!