The MTV-VH1 Music Video Awards were tonight. They sure have changed.

Madonna, looking relaxed, calm and very pretty, opened the show with a quiet and actually quite moving speech in tribute to Michael Jackson. After noting they were born the same year, she mentioned she lost her mother when she was a young girl. But she says Michael he got the short end of the stick: She lost a mother, he lost a childhood. She also talked about how "we" abandoned him, how while he was trying to raise a family, "we all sat in judgment of him." "There will never be anyone else like him again. He was a king." She says she's going to end on a positive note. "Michael Jackson was a human being but he was the King. Long live the King."

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Big Tent Democrat wrote earlier on his thoughts about the uselessness of the mainstream media. He ends with:

I used to devour news. Now I find it useless. I do not trust the Media. And I do not think their editorial judgments of what is news is particularly helpful or insightful. (Glenn Greenwald's column today demonstrates why.) So like the Sunday Talk shows, the Media is really becoming NOT part of my life. Is the same thing happening to any of you?

I still find the mainstream media very helpful. I just factcheck it by reading multiple accounts and comparing it to source documents. [More...]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote another screed about Fred Hiatt and the WaPo, coupled with my refrain that the Media is fast becoming irrelevant. This time I added the idea that the thing to do was ignore them.

Today I realized that I have not read the Washington Post (I do read Ezra Klein and via Greenwald, I read an online chat with WaPo reporter Paul Kane) at all since that day. This was not a deliberate decision. I just did not read it. Not Broder, not Cohen, not any of it. To be honest I do not read the NYTimes that much anymore. A story here or there when someone points it out.

I used to devour news. Now I find it useless. I do not trust the Media. And I do not think their editorial judgments of what is news is particularly helpful or insightful. (Glenn Greenwald's column today demonstrates why.) So like the Sunday Talk shows, the Media is really becoming NOT part of my life. Is the same thing happening to any of you?

Speaking for me only

In discussing the stupid heckling incident by Republican representative Joe Wilson of President Obama, Glenn Greenwald discusses what is really crazy - the Media's insistence that questioning the President, ANY President, is crazy:

Eugene Robinson today absurdly calls the GOP's disrespectful behavior at Obama's speech "un-American." Right-wing contempt for Obama is often petty, deeply emotional and ugly -- just like right-wing leaders themselves. But the demand that the President be venerated and treated as royalty is far more "un-American" than disruptive transgressions of etiquette. Wilson's heckling was juvenile and dumb, but that's all it was. If only a fraction of the media dismay devoted to his two-second breach of "decorum" had been directed to, say, rampant presidential lawbreaking, or the implementation of a torture regime, or the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in our various wars, we would be much better off.

Glenn goes on to discuss how Politico still thinks it is crazy to question the Bush Administration's statements in the runup to the Iraq Debacle. The reality is, as I have written for years now, the Media is absolutely incompetent on every level. It is not just partisan and biased, it simply fails at its basic mission of holding the government accountable. By now, this is a dog bites man story.

Speaking for me only

You may have noticed that Talk Left did not even mention South Carolina Republican Representative Joe Wilson's rude outburst in which he called the President a liar during Obama's speech. Speaking for me, it is because I could not care less that Wilson did that. There is too much fetishization of the President and faux civility anyway. But this, from Michelle Malkin, of all people, is hilarious:

The Left is in high dudgeon — never letting a moment of manufactured outrage go to waste.

The Queen of Manufactured Outrage knows it when she sees it.

Speaking for me only

Well, did we get anywhere spending the entire summer blogging about health care? Or was it wasted time? Should we have stuck to the crime reform issues that have made even less progress since Obama took office?

Your thoughts? I'll be in court early in the morning so I'm posting this now. It's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Remember this Ezra Klein logrolling for Joe Klein? Now Joe Klein returns the favor:

Here's Ezra Klein, who has established himself as a real voice of sanity in this debate, on what a public option actually might accomplish--and what it won't.

Is that a good trade for Ezra? Getting props from Joe Klein is not what it used to be. Wonder if they are discussing it on the JournOlist.

Speaking for me only

My copy of Max Blumenthal's new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party , arrived Friday. It's an expose of the Radical Right -- detailing how the fundamentalist Christian movement infiltrated the Republican party, transformed it, and now dominates it.

Max spends a lot of time on James Dobson and Sarah Palin. But there are others too, from Tom DeLay to GW Bush, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich. He explains how the leaders of the radical right "use authoritarian religion to excuse their personal hypocrisies." Max presents Sarah Palin not as a fringe player, but as one who represents the core of the GOP.

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In his continuing battle to declare President Obama powerless, Ezra Klein writes:

I'm not sure what good it does for progressives to delude themselves about Bush's success in passing pure domestic policy initiatives that easily overcame the opposition of Republican moderates, but the reality is that he saw his initiatives watered down at every turn.

Ezra goes on to recount how Bush, who LOST the popular vote and had only 50 Republicans Senators (until Jeffords switched, giving the DEMOCRATS control of the Senate), had to settle for "only" $1.65 TRILLION in tax cuts for the rich and that he hoisted a Medicare prescription drug program on conservative Republicans who did not like it. To Ezra, this proves that a President is impotent. Wow! What an idiotic post. President Bush, loser of the popular vote, with only 50 GOP senators (later only 49), got through most everything he wanted OVER the objections of his own Party stalwarts. Yep, that proves a President's impotence all right. Ezra confuses the fact that Bush's policies were disastrous with the fact that he actually had the power to enact them. Klein's apologias for President Obama are becoming more and more pathetic. Or delusional. Take your pick.

Speaking for me only

The Washington Post, which opposes investigations into potential war crimes committed by the Bush Administration, is gung ho on getting Charlies Rangel tossed as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Their calculus is easily understood - war crimes are just too divisive, but omissions on financial reports are trivial enough for one to actually care about. I mean, this is the same Washington Post that called for the removal of a President because of private consensual sex.

Let's face it, who really gives a damn what the Washington Post thinks about anything? I promise to ignore Fred Hiatt and his minions from now on.

Speaking for me only

You may have noticed I pick on Ezra Klein a lot. The reason is not because I dislike him. (Jeralyn says he is a terrific person.) I do not know him. I pick on him because of the brand he carries - "progressive" blogger espousing the "progressive" view. But that is an inaccurate characterization of the Ezra Klein who blogs at the Washington Post (And make no mistake, Ezra is on the fast track to being a major "progressive" voice in the Beltway Media Establishment.)

Part of that process is logrolling. Here is Ezra logrolling for Joe Klein:

Jean Edward Smith, who wrote one of the best biographies of FDR, writes:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S apparent readiness to backtrack on the public insurance option in his health care package is not just a concession to his political opponents — this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.

This was not true of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congresses that enacted the New Deal. With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.

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