“Terrorist Fist Jab”

I first read that as “terrorist fist job”. Ugh.

Perhaps the game could be turned around: “What message is Fox News trying to send with the choice of it’s name? What does it mean in today’s youth culture? Do they want to turn your daughters into sluts?”

is it me, or is there a remarkable similarity between faux news and the teletubbies–the former, being of course, the (even more) evil though equally mind-numbing twin of the latter?

I think he looks French.

Apparently “body language expert” is a real profession and academic discipline – 44,800 hits in Google. At least one of them has a Ph.D:

When gesturing, says Dr. Hogan, imagine a box that goes from your chin to your waist and is as wide as your shoulders. “Keep all your gestures in that box,” he says. “Make sure when you move your hands, they remain closer to your body than your elbows are.”

Nice gig, eh?

If it weren’t for Fox we wouldn’t have the the new serious mainstream self-styled liberal newsjournals. Look what’s happening to TPM, with the Polk award. Go to the book section and see the journos who guest post.

If all humility is false humility, all neutrality is false neutrality.
I only read opinionated authors. Fox reinvented low journalism and in doing that fostered something better than we’ve had in decades. Not that I love TPM (far from it) but it and things like it are a significant change, and we owe that to Murdoch’s willingness to be honest. Blatancy is a form of honesty; and besides he gave us the Simpsons.
This ties of course into DD’s recent post on social construction.

Small of the back from what I’ve seen from other footage.

Talk about a storm in a teacup. What will the right-wing rumour machine decide to pick up on next ?

seth edenbaum at 9 : do you mean to suggest that having a political propaganda network is the price of “The Simpsons”?
I would have thought that “Cops” more than made up for all the cartoons on Fox. ( After all, it’s statist ‘real life’ stories of valiant police.)
And TPM has been more accurate and a good deal more fact respecting than the Fox news operation.

What’s Obama doing with his hand right after the jab? Is that a butt pat?

A Sharia butt pat.

Too much abbsian hyperbole.
Marshall noted early on that he’s ended up to right of his readership. He’s a defender of Clinton and Clintonism and declared himself humbled in the presence of Arthur Schlesinger. He believes that my family after 2000 years, has a “right of return” to land in Israel that he denies to Palestinians who were born there. He named his son after the man who redrew the maps annexing the occupied territories.
Some people may be less offended by all this than I am, or less annoyed by Yglesias, and that’s fine. Bias is bias and it’s human, but I have a linklist of Jews, Arabs, academics and Quaker peaceniks who both individually and as a group are more rational, logical, and fair-minded about the middle east than Marshall and MJ “We have to deal with Arabs even though we don’t like them very much” Rosenberg.

And finally Marshall’s intellectual life like that of most journalist/policy wonks is founded in loyalty to a country.
I can accept the importance of that choice in popular discourse and even understand its necessity in Machiavellian terms, but I can’t take it seriously as a form of idealism. And in America left and right that’s just what it is: Nationalism is Reason. And we’re back at the social construction of reality again.

something changed in American economics in the 1980s (probably something to do with globalization) and it split previously more/less monolithic establishment into two antagonistic factions with mutually exclusive interests. And at that point, one way or another, ‘neutrality’ had to go.

I don’t know that stronger partisan conflict necessarily means there’s any deeper underlying conflict. Historically, the opposite is often the case — the parties compete most intensely when their constituencies are most overlapping. And indeed, the decline of unions (on the Dem side) and manufacturers (on the R side) has brought the economic bases of the parties closer.

Look at the incredibly partisan elections around 1900, another period where the basic consensus around economic issues was very strong.

“Is sincere loyalty better than insincere neutrality?”
Oh yeah.

I could put this here or here It would work either way.
Atrios

One constant refrain during the Free Press’s National Conference on Media Reform was that they were a nonpartisan entity and they could not endorse candidates in federal elections. This was meant to prevent speakers and panelists from doing the same.
Due to the various constraints from tax and campaign finance law, you have a lot of organizations that are unable to take the step of linking outcomes to politics. They can’t say “vote for Obama, so we’ll get media reform.” While in isolation it isn’t that big of a deal, I think it’s another thing which contributes to the lack of issues and policy in politics. A lot of people doing good stuff on policy just can’t intertwine the policy with the politics, even though unless the right people get elected none of the good stuff is going to happen.

More realistic acceptance of partisanship in the press and everywhere else would lead to better discussions.

My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism. Marr calls himself a “hack” and journalism a “trade” and comments on the professionalization of the american press. Atrios has called himself a hack, or at least he used to. We need a return to a vulgar political press, and Fox started that. I’m saying this all the time these days: If the political press treated GWB the way the entertainment press granted Britney Spears we’d be much better off. The only thing that bugged me about all the shit Clinton had to put up with what that the liberal press refused to dive into the mud against Bush. The liberal press is made up of holier than thou reformers catering to the educated middle class. The Nation doesn’t even try to be a popular magazine. If we had some left wing tabloids it would be the sign of a healthier political culture. Instead we have, or have had for a long time an elitist intellectual left. But that’s changing. Daily Kos among other things functions as a Tabloid. I was always disgusted by self-important Clinton defenders, as if the jackass deserved some sort of respect, but actually I should have shrugged, since they helped too. But not for the reasons they imagine.

Republican forms of government are vulgar. and cleanliness is next to Platonism. “Enlightened” conversation should be able to withstand mockery even if that mockery is petty and adolescent, because as often as not that enlightened conversation is a circle jerk of self-important dimwits. More than redstate I really can’t stand The Daily Howler. Bob Somerby drives me nuts.
Moral hazard is a risk for everything, so everything needs a counterforce: the market, the academy, the government, and anyone who calls himself an expert. My standard defense of law over philosophy is based on the fact that law in practice is incredibly low and vulgar and yet everyone understands that it’s at the moral center of our culture, as intellectual activity and subject of art. Lawyers are ubiquitous in fiction, movies and TV but at the same time they’re marginal. Law professors and legal philosophers don’t count. Talk to someone in criminal defense.

I’m with Max Sawicky who was one of the few people to admit losing patience with Kos and other teenagers unburdened by history (or historical memory) but the Daily Kos marked an important change in the politics of this country. I don’t have to take him seriously as a thinker or political philosopher to understand that.

Seth, I agree; it’s just that a universe of D-hacks and R-hacks is not a big improvement over the universe of united D&R hacks. I want a better variety of hacks.