I can't watch MSNBC

I tried to watch as much as I could last night, but my God the people MSNBC had on were terrible. Not to pile on too much, as the lefty blogosphere is doing a swell job of that already, I really must mention that Chris Matthews is unwatchable. Terrible. Horrible. Ditto with Joe Scarborough.

I've been trying to rely more on print and blogs this cycle and last night my make me abandon TV coverage of the political cycle entirely. It sucks.

I LOVE the WSJ Editorial Page

Since the Weekly World News is out of print. Today's Op-Ed:

[Obama] skips the tie at major indoor events, not just outdoor rallies and Rock the Vote concerts sponsored by MTV. He goes tieless not merely in his shirtsleeves, or even with a blazer. He carries the open-necked look into a realm it was never meant to go: with the two-piece, dark business suit.
This heresy earns the young senator praise from today's keepers of the style tablets. The Washington Post's Robin Givhan -- the acid-penned Madame Blackwell of the Beltway -- could hardly contain herself. "[Obama's] tieless suit," she gushed, "[is] a cross between the style of a 1950s home-from-the-office dad and a 1990s GQ man about town. It is warmly, safely, nostalgically . . . cool."
Others have noticed something else. Take the impeccably liberal Jeff Greenfield. Ask yourself," he challenged his CNN audience, "is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable." We can thank Mr. Greenfield for being reckless enough to say what many were thinking. But he mistakes Mr. Ahmadinejad's source. Mr. Obama may have gotten the idea from GQ, but the Iranian President got it from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
One of the lesser-known outcomes of the 1979 Iranian revolution was the stigmatization of the tie as a tool of Western Imperialism. The Ayatollah even denounced some of his perceived enemies as "tie-wearing cronies of the West." Today in much of the Islamist world, the tie is seen as not merely pro-Western but anti-Islamic, even though no prohibition of the garment can be found in Islamic law. There is a stricture against men wearing silk, but Muslim dandies can get around that by wearing cashmere or linen ties -- and many do.
It's hard to think of anything less hip -- or less intended to be hip -- than Islamist dogma on personal grooming. Yet despite traveling radically different routes along the way, Messrs. Obama and Ahmadinejad somehow manage to wind up in the same sartorial spot. Sort of like the way Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich share virtually identical foreign policies.

My goodness that's a good piece. In one piece they imply that Obama may not wear ties out of some fealty to Khomeni (perhaps his bare neckedness is supposed to be to Muslims what Bush's "Don't put a period on the sentence..." bullshit is to fundamentalist Christians?), but also equate Ron Paul with Kucinich. That is professionalism. That is efficiency. My one critique is that they never got Obama's middle name into the piece, but perhaps they thought it would be too obvious?

This is an embarrassment, even by the low standards of the WSJ editorial page.

Citi of Arabia

That is, I swear, the title of an editorial in today's WSJ. It's an amusing read. Apparently the WSJ believes in free markets up to the point where the markets do something that they don't like. Like having shifty Arabs buy up our good assets. Harsh? Judge for yourself:

Abu Dhabi's 4.9% stake combined with the 3.9% stake of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal makes them the bank's dominant shareholders, and who knows how many other smaller holdings are in Middle Eastern hands. The small Gulf states may be governed separately from Saudi Arabia, but they are closely linked by geography, family ties, and national interests. For purposes of political influence, they often behave as part of the same tribe.

Got that? "[S]ame tribe." Nice. And these are just the big deals. Who knows how many other Arabs from the same tribe have bought little pieces of Citi - hell, Arabs may own all of it for all we know! And if they own it they'll use it... for what exactly?

and it offers a Middle Eastern entree into the U.S. financial system that since 9/11 plays a pivotal role in the war on terror.

Ah, yes, they'll have an entree into the U.S. financial system which up until this time has been great at stopping Saudi Arabia and others in the tribe from funding terrorism. WTF? Note to the WSJ: they really don't need the U.S. financial system to fund terrorists.

And, on top of all the other nonsense, the editorial uses a weird phrase:

Citigroup did have to shore up its balance sheet, and we suppose petrodollars are a better source of capital than U.S. taxpayers under a "too big to fail" doctrine. On the other hand, where were Mr. Rubin and the bank board when Citi was betting so much on subprime?

Did you catch it? How in the hell is that an "On the other hand"? It's my understanding that when one uses those words, it indicates that you are making a counterpoint to your previous statement. Most of the time it wouldn't be a big deal and I'd let it go, but it stuck out for me because they do it again later in the editorial:

Readers of these columns might recall in particular Abu Dhabi's adventures in Beltway banking. It was Sheik Zayed, the father of the current ruler of
Abu Dhabi, who owned the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or
BCCI, whose fraudulent tentacles spanned the globe, including the highest levels
of Washington politics a decade and a half ago.

The current emir, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, is not his father -- who always maintained that he was a victim of the BCCI fraud himself. And Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney who investigated BCCI, tells us that Abu Dhabi "has been responsible" since BCCI.

On the other hand, the bank was forced to settle for hundreds of millions of dollars after lying to evade American banking laws. Mr. Morgenthau also recounted that the elder Sheik Zayed once called to inform the State Department that, if Mr. Morgenthau indicted anyone in the royal family over the scandal, he would pull his billions out of the U.S. and make no further investments here.

So in the 80's, al Nahyan's father led BCCI. However, al Nahyan is not his father, and Abu Dhabi has been fine since BCCI. On the other hand, in the 80's his father was a crook and said unpleasant things.

If this was an off-the-cuff speech maybe I'd understand, but I'd expect someone proofread this. Perhaps I expect too much.

One last thing to keep in mind, the next paragraph after the excerpt above reads:

Mr. Morgenthau says this message was passed to him via the Justice Department. His reply: "Tell them that you don't control that cranky S.O.B. in New York." As a long-time New York DA, Mr. Morgenthau could stand up to such political pressure the way the Justice Department might not. In certain corners of the world, large investments come with political expectations.

"The way the Justice Department might not." Truer words were never written on in a WSJ editorial. When it comes down to our safety, or the profits of the friends of highly placed Republicans, even the WSJ knows what the score is.

THIS is what it's come to?

This is craziness:

Barack Obama is no longer a scofflaw, at least in Cambridge and Somerville. Two weeks before the US senator from Illinois launched his presidential campaign, he paid parking tickets he received while attending Harvard Law School, officials said yesterday. Obama received 17 parking tickets in Cambridge between 1988 and 1991, according to the city's Traffic, Parking & Transportation Department. Of those tickets, he paid only two while he was a student and paid them late, said Susan Clippinger, the office's director.

I remember reading (I think it may have been in The Onion) that Obama sometimes took a penny, but never left a penny. This story approaches that level of nonsense. Whomever among us who doesn't have, or has never had, an unpaid parking ticket somewhere, please feel free to cast the first stone. And how exactly does this reflect on his ability to be president? Does it speak to character? To respect for the law? I don't think so.

But, if we're going back to 1988, 1988! looking for stuff, there are going to be a ton of candidates with some 'splainin' to do (I'm talking to you Rudy...).

If this is what the media is going to focus on over the next 2 years this is going to be the longest, most pathetic race in history.