MoDo:

I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama. . . . A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.

She can always create a blog. More likely, HuffPo will hire her - they do need someone to provide even more Clinton Hate.

This is an Open Thread.

Speaking for me only

. . . will be the name of the new blog I will be creating (Kidding, no new blogs until Jeralyn kicks me out.) Atrios writes:

Any time the phrase "what the blogs should do..." comes to mind you should probably not type it out. Start your own damn blog and do with it what you want!

I disagree with this. Bloggers write "What ____ Should Do" posts about everyone and everything and I really do not see why blogs themselves should be exempt from it. There should be no sacred cows - not the Media, not pols, not anyone - not even bloggers.

Speaking for me only. This is an Open Thread.

Naturally, HuffPo, but my good friend Al Giordano just can not give up on his dreams that Hillary at State is just a big confabulation of the Clinton Court:

Well, not to, ahem, torture any of you with the same message I've been pushing all week, but it does bear repeating: Nothing's a "done deal" until you hear it from the big man himself or his spokesmen speaking on the record.

He's still dreaming. Meanwhile, the NYTimes matter of factly reports:

Apparently with no intentional irony, Josh Marshall writes:

You've probably noticed Mark Halperin's claim that the level of pro-Obama bias in the election coverage this year was so bad it was "disgusting." I'll leave it to others to analyze what "disgusting" means when deployed by someone who takes his journalistic cues from Matt Drudge.

(Emphasis supplied.) On taking cues from Drudge, Somerby wrote about Marshall:

Patrick Ruffini berates his fellow Republicans for obsessing on the "threat" of the return of the Fairness Doctrine. It does seem a strange crusade, given that Democrats certainly are not clamoring for the return of the Fairness Doctrine and Republicans (rightly in my view) believe the Media was pro-Obama. In any event, I thought I would look to see who was a proponent of the Fairness doctrine and why. (My recollection of the Fairness Doctrine was some ranting citizen on for 5 minutes at 1 in the morning, but maybe it did more than that.) I found this article at the FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a sort of liberal answer to the late Reed Irvine's old conservative Media "watchdog" organization, AIM (Accuracy In Media) site. This is the argument they presented in 2005:

Matt Yglesias criticizes the Left flank of the blogs (specifically Chris Bowers.) I want to speak in defense of them. While on policy I am to the right of all of them (Sirota, Stoller, et al), I simply love that they speak strongly in favor of the policies they believe in. That they worry about it. That they pressure about it. A while ago I wrote at Corrente my view of what the Left blogs should be about:

Lambert invited me to discuss what the blogosphere should do now. My short answer is that it should do what it should have been doing before - fighting for the issues each particular blog believes in through the mechanisms it feels are most effective. The short answer is to do what is most effective to advance the cause of the issues you believe in.

That is what Chris, Matt, David and the rest of the "concern trolls" are doing. And Gawd bless them for it. We need more people fighting for what they believe in.

Speaking for me only

More cracks in the ceiling:

The vampire romance "Twilight" drained the box office in its opening weekend, taking in $70.6 million. Catherine Hardwicke's film also enjoyed the biggest opening ever for a female director, blowing away the previous standard of $41.1 million set by Mimi Leder 's " Deep Impact " in 1998.

"Redemption," the two hour prequel to Season 7 of "24" airs tonight. It takes place in Africa, America's president-elect is a woman and, the review says, while there's torture, it's not being done by Americans. (Does that make it more acceptable for us to watch?) Season 7, which starts in January, will take place in America.

Audrey (Jack's old girlfriend who was the daughter of the William DeVane character) is listed as being in the Season 7 cast. I've gotten so used to watching her as Nico in this season's Lipstick Jungle, I wonder if she will still seem real as Audrey.

In other tv news, I was really sorry to see Bachelorette Deanna Pappas and snowboarder Jesse from Breckenridge have broken up. [More...]

I wonder if Greenwald and Digby (See also blog star and "concern troll" Jane Hamsher) will be called morons for this:

Digby explained perfectly why this reaction is so mystifying (re-printed with her consent):

Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn't ask for anything. So, we have the great symbolic victory of the first black president (and that's not nothing, by the way) who is also a bipartisan, centrist technocrat. Surprise. . . . Obama said repeatedly that he wasn't ideological, that he cared about "what works." I don't know why people didn't believe that. He's a technocrat who wants to "solve problems" and "change politics." The first may actually end up producing the kind of ideological shift liberals desire simply because of the dire set of circumstances greeting the new administration. (Hooray for the new depression!) The second was always an empty fantasy --- politics is just another word for human nature, and that hasn't changed since we were dancing around the fire outside our caves.

[MORE . . .]

From the No Kidding File, though Halperin must have been asleep during the 2000 election:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

No one can doubt that Obama was the Media Darling. But for Halperin to pretend that he and his cohorts were not disgustingly bad, indeed they turned in the worst political journalistic performance in history (see Somerby, Bob), during the 2000 election is just shameful of him. The difference is that their 2000 performance had perhaps the most devastating consequences in the history of the nation.

But Mark Halperin was, is and always will be a hack.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Jamison Foser writes a good piece on how the Media now hates "experience" when they hated "change" in 1993. Foser links to Eric Boehlert's piece that explains it:

That's the point we've been making for the last week as we've watched MoDo and Chris Matthews and David Broder and the rest of the Village elders raise a stink about Clinton joining the Obama administration. And our point is this: The press represents nobody but the press on this topic. Meaning, the press has no political cover on this story because there's no partisan angle to the SoS story, which means their long-running Clinton hatred is just sort of out there, exposed for all to see.

Think about. It's been virtually impossible to find any senior members of Congress--Republican or Democrat--who publicly oppose Clinton as the SoS, which in and of itself is rather astonishing. . . . So, if you're keeping score at home, that means the Obama White House is in favor of Clinton, Republicans in Congress are in favor, Democrats in Congress are in favor, and liberal activists are, essentially, in favor. (And so are most Americans.) So we go back to our original point. Who was [Joe] Scarborough talking about when he kept referring to these detractors who Hitchens represented. Who were these SoS "critics"? Answer: Scarborough was talking about the Beltway press corps. And if the Beltway press corps thinks Clinton should not be SOS, then that's big news.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Remember when talkers on the right became so irate over Dan Rather's report (based in part on documents that may have been fabricated) that George Bush skipped out on some of his National Guard service? As BTD discussed here, the stink about the allegedly forged documents distracted the public from the underlying issue: whether Bush actually reported for duty.

Distraction is what the GOP does best, and its roaring umbrage cowed CBS. Anxious to prove that it had no liberal bias and to appease the corporate interests to which both CBS and the GOP are beholden, CBS "investigated" Rather and limited his work, effectively forcing his resignation.

Rather sued, claiming the rigged investigation violated his contract and damaged his reputation. According to this report, Rather has uncovered evidence to support that claim. [more ...]