I’m still here! Still working on that project in a super secret location and had some surprises lately that have kept me busy.
In the meantime, I’ve seen the kerfuffle between Jon Stewart and Paul Krugman over Platy, the $1 TRILLION dollar platinum coin and I’m going to side with Krugman on this one.
Jon Stewart, meet me at camera 4.
Ok, see here’s the thing. I know the coin idea, which was viable until the Fed shot it down, sounded bug f^&*ing nutz. I’m guessing your brother had something to do with your attitude. Maybe there’s some internal family related capture going on there that you might not be quite willing to admit to.
But I figure it this way. It’s like someone is trying to abduct you in the grocery store parking lot. If they’re going to get all insane, YOU need to get all insane. Like roll your eyes back in your head, let out some blood curling shrieks, foam at the mouth, lose control of your bladder. If you don’t do anything just as crazy to make the abduction more trouble than it’s worth, the crazy guy is going to take you for a nice loooooong ride from which you may never return.
Besides, Jon, you can’t claim to be just a funny guy and then get all serious when you interview people like Chris Christie. Or conversely, you can’t not do your homework, make some half-assed, pompous pronouncement and then pull this “Oh, I’m just a funny guy with a fake news program” shit. People will get confused. You know and I know and Paul Krugman knows that there are a lot of people who depend on you to circumvent the media filters to tell the truth. I’m sorry, Jon, but you have become a Peter Parker and with your power, you have an awesome responsibility.
I was very disappointed in the way you behaved on Monday night when you lectured Krugman. You’ve done a lot of good, Jon, but Krugman is on YOUR side and when you pulled that crap on Monday night, you just created a rift that the Republicans and their media allies are going to drive a truck through. It would have been better for all of us for you to invite Paul on The Daily Show and then go at him hammer and tongs. Krugman would have made a great guest. Even if you don’t agree with him, he’s got a rapier wit and at least his arguments make sense. Sniping with your megaphone just looks childish ego trip. Perhaps you need to spend some time attending David Brooks’ Humility course at Yale.
You’re not the only game in town. You are merely one of the more important pieces in the rag-tag group of allies trying to fight the forces of meanness, inequality and exploitation. Get your head out of your ass.
I’ll be right back… sooner or later. Carry on.
Filed under: General | Tagged: $1 trillion platinum coin, jon stewart, Larry Leibowitz, Paul Krugman, platy |
The Confluence 
That’s exactly what has bothered me about Jon Stewart for a long time. My eyes were opened on election night, 2004 when almost in mid sentence, he was all over the Pres. Bush has been re-elected. People were STILL voting in Ohio — nevermind that they couldn’t possibly have counted the votes! …. And what did we get the very next day? The Kerry cave-in.
A bunch of laughs, that was (rolling eyes)
Since then, I’ve thought of him as not just fake news but also fake opinions.
Sure, he can make me laugh. But, in the end it’s too close to fake humor.
John is there to fluff the pillow of the powerful…I mean why else would he be on the air ? His shtick is to appear to tweak truth to power , but one will notice the targets are carefully chosen .
He swallows whole our imperial criminal foreign policy etc, nodding obediently at whatever tribe Time Life Co trots out . .A Krugman hit job spanking was called for. He performed it
What makes Mr. Stewart so good at his job is he’s that rare media species that is not in it just for the money…oh no…sadly he wants to be one of them. He longs to join the power class. So he does bring a passion to his job so many other media types lack. In his heart, he is a cooler, Charlie Rose.
Sorry for the delay in releasing your comment — I haven’t been online much the last couple of weeks.
I think what you say about Stewart is also true for David Letterman and once I became aware of it, they both became unwatchable for me.
no problem katiebird and I agree. They gain their popularity by being apearing “diffrent” and speaking some reality now and then. But will do as told of course.
I watch bits of Stewart on computer feeds sometimes. He can be trenchantly funny. Unfortunately for us, his ultimate social class loyalties lie with the Low-End Upper Class, and that’s the class whose interests he will sometimes use his show to advance.
I remember several years ago many people getting upset when he stepped outside the TV studio and began planning that Big Rally for Sanity . . . as if the targets of the Repuglan Party were somehow insane for voicing resentment over that targetting.
The Fed has no legal authority to refuse U.S. tender.
This is all O, he wants to be able to claim he is being “held hostage” so that he can push through the destruction of Social Security and Medicare and say that the Evil Republicans left him no choice. My guess is that the Obama crew had gamed all this stuff out in advance some time before the last debt-ceiling faux-crisis and constructed some elaborate rationalisations as to why the 14th Amendment didn’t apply or couldn’t be used, but this coinage loophole caught them completely off guard.
Unlike the 14th amendment there is not even the slightest wiggle room here, so they’re resorting to outright falsehood in order to cover their asses now.
At the very least, we can keep letting our Democratic officeholders know over and over and over again . . . by email, by real mail, by phone calls, etc.; that if any changes of any sort whatsoever are permitted to be made to SS/Mcare/Mcaide; that we will never vote for another national level Democrat ever again. Nor will we ever again give any money or time or phonebank assistance to any Democratic officeseeker or any national-level Party effort ever again if SS/Mcare/Mcaide are touched or even mentioned in any way.
If the Democratic officeholders want to hold our survival benefits harmless, they have the power to do so. If they allow any harm to come to them, they meant to arrange that harm right from the start.
And the so-called “real” Democrats would be revealed as mere enablers to the Catfood Democrats through the psychological manipulation subterfuge of lending the “Democratic” name to the Catfood Democrats as “cover”.
I was about to leave a comment about your mysterious days-long absence: come back, riverdaughter. all is forgiven. and here you are!
to be continued…
Glad to see that you are back RD.
“rag-tag group of allies trying to fight the forces of meanness, inequality and exploitation”
well put
What comes to mind is the old phrase about FDR, “a traitor to his class.” When all is said and done, wise-cracking Jon Stewart does not make the FDR leap and “betray” his class in the interest of his country and the public at large. From his biography on Wikipedia, Krugman did not grow up as a member of the upper class. He chooses not to betray his country and the public for the approval of riverdaughter’s dragon class. Good for him.
Scrooge was lectured in “A Christmas Carol”, “Mankind is your business.” Take the lesson Jon. Those holiday spirits can make nasty night visitors.
You may be an Obot
if you love drone target pickers
hmmm…you may be an Obot
I think quite a list could be compiled
Director Kathryn Bigelow defends
her indefensible Zero Dark Thirty
http://tinyurl.com/aaa5ok4
The filmmaker and her screenwriter Mark Boal, in their political blindness and misreading of the current state of American public opinion, thought they could get away with murder, as it were.
They assumed that wide layers of the population would be as excited as they were by contact with torturers and assassins and would be enthused about a version of events essentially told by the latter. They were mistaken in this…..
Yet how many of those wide layers of the population voted for Obama the second time around? This was all pretty clear the SECond time around.
Who says they voted for Obama? A lot of people voted against Romney, not for Obama.
It is regretable they didn’t vote for one or another third party, then. An against-Romney vote FOR Obama helped get Obama elected, and is therefor a functional vote for Obama.
I can understand why so few people voted third party. NaderBush and the Republigreens poisoned that well for possibly decades to come with their grubby little poseuristic lies about Bush and Gore being “no different”.
Remember their clever little slogan highlighting their own
“too cool for school-ness”? “Gush versus Bore”. Ha ha ha. That’s a good one. You sure nit the hail on the nead there, folks. And who can forget McGaw versus Wellstone? Thought the RepubliGreens really wish that you would.
So yes . . . near-zero third party votes is understandable, after what the Green Party has done to discredit the entire concept.
Assuming that RUR is correct (which I do not) that Nader helped the Busheviks steal the 2000 election, the obvious next question is “Why was the election close enough to be stolen”?
I would blame Gore himself, for listening to the Beltway wisdom (pardon the oxymoron) which told him the Murkan people were outraged–OUTRAGED, I TELL YA–that Clinton had engaged in unauthorized whoopee with a consenting adult, and so Gore had to run away from Clinton. Never mind that Clinton, frequently-dropped trousers and all, could have handily won a third term if the Constitution had allowed it. 🙄
Nader didn’t lend that much actual help to Bush. But that is what he tried to do. That is what he was in it for . . . to get Gore defeated.
I was dismayed by some of the badness of the Gore campaign. But I voted for Gore anyway, in defense of my own survival interests. And it wasn’t all Gore’s bad campaigning. It was also orchestrated media aggression against Gore by such people as Maureen Dowd and others. I remember reading somewhere that the Gore campaign didn’t give the travelling press-poolers the kind of high-class good food that other candidates used to give them and that too upset
them into slyly smearing him at every opportunity.
(The McGaw versus Wellstone election further deepened the sense of bitter grudge which possibly a handfull of people beyond just me feel about the Republican-assisted Green Party presence.)