Upgrade: ‘This Week’ goes to Amanpour
Finally, someone who can pronounce “Iran” and “Iraq” correctly. Way to turn the page, ABC! (You gave us a scare last week…) Christiane Amanpour will be the first woman to host a Sunday show, and I’m sure she’ll be great (and give the show more of an international view.) Meanwhile, CNN just went down another notch, having lost Ms. Amanpour and gained Erick Erickson. I see doom on the horizon in Atlanta …
There goes Sunday
George Stephanopoulos will give up discussing important issues facing the nation and world on “This Week” — which at this stage is such an infinitely superior show to the weak “Meet the Press” starring Dubya’s pal “Stretch,” that it’s really not worth Tivo’ing both shows anymore — to do cooking segments and interview muppets, reality show winners, and cast members from “Glee.” Good luck with that, George. Read more
Maybe it’s just me …
… but I find myself wishing Debbie Wasserman Schultz was a candidate to be the Democratic Senate nominee from Florida. In a state with only a handful of political stars (Alan Grayson is another, but may be too unpredictable to grow beyond the House,) she certainly is one. Her appearance on “This Week” today was a fine example of how Democrats, when they have convictions, can sock it to the opposition without appearing shrill. Watch as the congresswoman, a breast cancer survivor herself, takes down Marsha Blackburn and her blizzard of page numbers (raise your hand if you think Blackburn has really read the House healthcare bill…) for politicizing the illness:
Nice work. Read more
Michael Steele’s unified theory of television unpleasantness
Does RNC chair Michael Steele actually believe that the more unpleasant he is on television, the more people will be drawn to his hip-hop-hooray version of the GOP? I really just don’t get it. Don’t they have a budget for television coaches on that side? Watch Steele on “This Week” today with the much more pleasant Tim Kaine… and cringe …
George Will to Dick Cheney: some ‘dithering’ before Iraq invasion would have come in handy
George Will scores the quote of the day on “This Week”:
“A bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction,”
Meanwhile, the panelists must have felt somewhat diminished by having to share the table with talk radio nag Laura Ingram. Watch here.
Maxine Waters deep sixes the ‘bipartisan’ meme
Rep. Waters stole the show on “This Week,” staring down fellow Congressman Mike Pence and demanding to know: if there’s real bipartisanship going on, where’s your bill? Watch:
Rep. Waters has long been a tough lady, particularly on this issue. And isn’t it interesting that perhaps the toughest players in this healthcare debate are the women: Waters, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and of course, Nancy Pelosi?
Michelle Malkin’s crazy unemployment theory debunked by the economist she quotes
Leaving aside the question of what the ABC News “This Week” bookers are smoking these days, having already booked of all people Karl Rove, and now crackpot right wing blogger Michelle Malkin as panelists on the once vaunted “round table” (on which George Will, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts normally sit) we now have the official Malkin Doctrine on unemployment. It goes like this: the $200-300 a week jobless Americans are receiving in unemployment benefits is a big, fat incentive to stay unemployed. I mean, how great is it to go from a $40,000 $50,000, $60,000 or $100,000 paycheck to the equivalent of $7 bucks an hour? With that kind of dough rolling in, you can just kick back, crack open a can of spam and not be able to afford your mortgage OR your car note for as long as the guvment is putting out! Sweet!
The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker tried to explain to Ms. Malkin that when a posting for 20 jobs produces 6,000 applicants, as is happening routinely around the country, people aren’t lazy, or unemployed by choice, or chowing down on tasty “government cheese” as the classy Ms. Malkin termed unemployment aid, they’re — wait for it — unable to find a job because there aren’t many jobs out there. (Tucker was kind enough not to add the word “dummy,” so I’ll do it for her.)
Malkin tried to pawn off her crackerjack theory of lavish unemployment aid keeping people lazy and soft on a former Clinton administration economist, “Larry” Katz — something she’s been selling for months on her blog, every time the notion of extending unemployment benefits comes up. In January, she wrote:
A program intended to be a safety net has become an excuse for people to remain unemployed once they lose a job by discouraging job search activities until benefits are almost exhausted. [The other panelists just looked at Malkin like she was insane for most of the segment. Poor Jerry Seib from the WSJ looked like he wanted to crawl under the table.]
Even the Clinton administration apparently understood the perverse consequences:
The two links provided in the above post clip? Neither will take you to anything written by Lawrence Katz (maybe she knows him well enough to call him Larry, but I don’t,) who now teaches economics at Harvard. Rather, she links to the right wing National Center for Policy Analysis think tank, which specializes in, among other things, debunking global warming, pushing for the privatization of Social Security, and stopping healthcare reform (its credits include the phony British healthcare system-cancer link meme and the new tack: that reforming healthcare will kill your granny), and Fox News. Worse, the Fox News link wasn’t even to a news story. It was to an op-ed opposing the passage of the stimulus package back in January.
Malkin tried to represent herself as a jourlaist on the “This Week” panel, rather than an activist. But our crack journo has yet to actually quote Mr. Katz himself, who has written several scholarly papers on the theoretical issues of compensation, employment and unemployment, or to interview him, in her capacity “covering” the issues, as she also claimed. Well, an actual journalist, working, as it happens, for the New York Times, did bother, and this is what Erik Eckholm came up with, in an article that coincidentally, ran in TODAY’s paper:
Traditionally, many economists have been leery of prolonged unemployment benefits because they can reduce the incentive to seek work. But that should not be a concern now because jobs remain so scarce, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard.
For every job that becomes available, about six people are looking, Dr. Katz said. “Unemployment insurance gives income to families who are really suffering and can’t find work even if they are hustling to look,” he said.
With the economy still listing, he added, a temporary extension can provide a quick fiscal stimulus. And, Dr. Katz said, when people exhaust unemployment and health insurance, many end up applying for disability benefits, which become a large, unending drain on the Treasury.
Oops… Kind of begs the question, how a person can make a living on the Internet, and yet not know how to Google.
Watch the roundtable here.
Related: ThinkProgress breaks down the Malkin-called “counterinsurgency.”
The political-media complex’s tortured logic
Glenn Greenwald concludes, quite rightly, that the political-media class is too corrupt to really take on torture, at least not above the level of “rogue interrogators” (which I guess means guys who don’t have cushy jobs at Berkely or the power to order the CIA to violate the law…) while Digby relieves me of the duty of watching another tedious “This Week” roundtable on TiVo.
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