HBO Crap Documentary

HBO is featurning a documentary called, "Right America: Feeling Wrong." Since it's HBO, the channel that hosts Bill Maher, red flags go up immediately. It's actually produced and made by Nancy Pelosi's daughter. Instinct tells me that it'll string bits of thinks taken out of context, inarticulate people, and a few token racists. Well, as usual, my instincts were correct. Even the Washington Post was having none of it:

It's drive-by journalism, to put it charitably, a string of stupefyingly brief hit-and-run interviews with a bunch of unidentified people who we know are going to say nothing that will surprise us. By then, we've already figured out they're going to be fried by Pelosi's camera. We know they're going to sound like yahoos, often goaded, always reduced to sound bites and caricatures.

All the conventions of the smirking, winking, belittling political documentary are abided by in this film. An inordinate number of the yahoos wear T-shirts and weird caps. There is the obligatory NASCAR tailgating scene with the requisite Confederate flags and some white guys saying they'll never vote for any black man. There are a couple of campaign events sporting all-American schoolgirl choruses who sound like they're right off the "Up With People" tour bus. There is a young guy whose T-shirt, meant to deride Obama, declares "Say No to Socilism," and when Alexandra Pelosi tells him he's misspelled socialism and asks him to define it, we know he's not going to be able to, that he's going to say something way wrong and stupid -- which he does, offering that socialism is "basically, it's like the views of Hitler. It's between like communism and -- I don't know what the other word is."
In short, it's good yuks time....

But she looks to be in over her head here with a documentary that professes to explain why die-hard conservatives feel so aggrieved. Note: Just to turn on the camera and record the juvenility and venom at a campaign rally isn't nearly enough to capture the whys of that behavior. Except for some celebrities, we never see most of her subjects for more than a few seconds. We never enter their homes, never view what they do for a living. We never get to know their families or acquire virtually any information about their backgrounds. We don't know if anybody has been scarred by a traumatic event or recently lost a job. My gosh, with one exception, we never learn their names. This is less a documentary than a reason for a snarky laugh track.

As a reporter who spent much of 2008 writing about McCain and talking with many of his most ardent supporters, I certainly met angry conservatives along the way. A few times I was accosted by people who excoriated the media they loathed while expressing assorted fears of Obama -- their conviction that he would bring ruin to the country; that he was a rogue Middle Eastern agent; that he would seize their guns; that he would make a point of keeping the white man down.

But such opinions were a decided minority....While passionate in their opposition to Democrats, most of the conservatives I met at the rallies that day expressed fascination and respect for Obama.

From Who's Perspective

The bias is alive and well. The writer treats failed efforts to bring about socialist healthcare as bad.

AP - This week, Obama will start the dialogue on how to increase coverage, restrain costs and improve quality.

Whether a bill can get through Congress and to Obama this year is uncertain. For half a century, the track record on health care has been one of missed opportunities, spectacular failures and hard-won incremental gains.

AP Factcheck's Obama's Speech

Either hell has frozen over, or the adulation of Obama is beginning to thaw.

By CALVIN WOODWARD

WASHINGTON (AP) - At least Route 31 is a road to somewhere.

President Barack Obama had it both ways Monday when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana. He bragged about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.

Obama's sales pitch on the enormous package he wants Congress to make law has sizzle as well as steak. He's projecting job creation numbers that may be impossible to verify and glossing over some ethical problems that bedeviled his team.

In recent years, the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska came to symbolize the worst excesses of congressional earmarks, a device that allows a member of Congress to add money for local projects in legislation, practically under the radar.

Nothing so bold, or specific, as that now-discarded bridge project is contained in the stimulus package. That's not to say the package steers clear of waste or parochial interests. Obama played to such interests Monday, speaking at one point as if he'd come to fill potholes.

A look at some of Obama's claims in Elkhart, Ind., in advance of a prime-time news conference called to make his case to the largest possible audience:

OBAMA: "I know that there are a lot of folks out there who've been saying, 'Oh, this is pork, and this is money that's going to be wasted,' and et cetera, et cetera. Understand, this bill does not have a single earmark in it, which is unprecedented for a bill of this size. ... There aren't individual pork projects that members of Congress are putting into this bill."

THE FACTS: There are no "earmarks," as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork - tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.

For example, the latest version contains $2 billion for a clean-coal power plant with specifications matching one in Mattoon, Ill., $10 million for urban canals, $2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars, and $255 million for a polar icebreaker and other "priority procurements" by the Coast Guard.

Obama told his Elkhart audience that Indiana will benefit from work on "roads like U.S. 31 here in Indiana that Hoosiers count on." He added: "And I know that a new overpass downtown would make a big difference for businesses and families right here in Elkhart."

U.S. 31 is a north-south highway serving South Bend, 15 miles from Elkhart in the northern part of the state.

OBAMA: "I've appointed hundreds of people, all of whom are outstanding Americans who are doing a great job. There are a couple who had problems before they came into my administration, in terms of their taxes. ... I made a mistake ... I don't want to send the signal that there are two sets of rules."

He added: "Everybody will acknowledge that we have set up the highest standard ever for lobbyists not working in the administration."

THE FACTS: Two of his appointees, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle for secretary of health and human services and Nancy Killefer as his chief compliance officer, dropped out after reports they had not paid a portion of their taxes.

Obama previously acknowledged he "screwed up" in making it seem to Americans that there is one set of tax compliance rules for VIPs and another set for everyone else. Yet his choice for treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, hung in and achieved the post despite having belatedly paid $34,000 to the IRS, an agency Geithner now oversees.

That could leave the perception that there is one set of rules for Geithner and another set for everyone else.

On lobbyists, Obama has in fact established tough new rules barring them from working for his administration. But the ban is not absolute.

William J. Lynn III, tapped to be the No. 2 official at the Defense Department, recently lobbied for military contractor Raytheon. William Corr, chosen as deputy secretary at Health and Human Services, has lobbied as an anti-tobacco advocate. And Geithner's choice for chief of staff, Mark Patterson, is an ex-lobbyist from Goldman Sachs.

OBAMA: "The plan that we've put forward will save or create 3 million to 4 million jobs over the next two years."

THE FACTS: Job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers.

Beyond that, it's unlikely the nation will ever know how many jobs are saved as a result of the stimulus. While it's clear when jobs are abolished, there's no economic gauge that tracks job preservation.

The Media and the Catholic Church

Pope Benedict recently lifted an excommunication of 4 bishops concencrated by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the changes brought about by Vatican II. One of the bishops denies the Holocaust was as extensive as

Lifting an excommunication is not a pardon of all crimes. People are excommunicated for creating a schism or promoting a heresy, not sinning. They haven't even excommunicated left wing politicans for supporting abortion, even though that is actively perpetuating a crime that is happening currently, rather than denying one that happened in the past.

Angela Merkel rebukes Pope in Holocaust row

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, became the first world leader yesterday to condemn Pope Benedict XVI over his rehabilitation of an ultra-conservative British bishop who denies that Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust.

Ms Merkel called on the German Pope to reject publicly the views of Bishop Richard Williamson, who has denied that six million Jews were gassed in Nazi concentration camps. In a highly unusual rebuke to the Pope she said that she did not believe there had been “sufficient” clarification.

“This should not be allowed to pass without consequences,” Ms Merkel, daughter of a Lutheran pastor, said. “The Pope and the Vatican should clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial and that there must be positive relations with the Jewish community overall.” ...

He said that there had been too little internal discussion of the Pope’s reinstatement of the arch-conservative followers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and a failure to foresee the row that followed. Cardinal Kasper told Vatican radio: “There have certainly been errors in the way the Curia \ handled this.” He added that the reinstatement of the four bishops was far from complete.

The followers of Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council, were excommunicated after being ordained by him without authorisation from Rome, and formed the breakaway Society of St Pius X (SSPX). Cardinal Kasper said that the Pope had wanted to bring them back into the fold to reinforce the unity of the Church.