Ah! Literation

The AP just ran the headline:

Activists, actors, athletics honored by Obama

Which makes me think next week we'll see the headline "Brewers, bakers, basketmakers honored by Obama." In 24 weeks the suspense will be fierce when we find out if X, Y, and Z get their own weeks or have to share ("Xeroxers, Yachtsmen, and Zoologists honored by Obama").

Actually, if you read the article, you find out that scientists and humanitarians are also honored. Note they don't get to make the A-list, pun intended--sort of like The Professor and Mary Anne when they were just "the rest." Mary Anne was too a humanitarian.

Of course, the list is the usual grab bag of honorable note-worthies, from John and Kate (who thankfully didn't have to share an award, and yes, John had his impregnated by the end of the ceremony) to Michael Bay, as this is summer, after all, and the White House felt it necessary to award his amazing ability to take a cartoon, about toys, and make it seem even dumber than a cartoon or toys. Twice.

Seriously, the list, while a bit more consciously conscientious than say a Bush White House Presidential Medal of Freedom group--Bishop Tutu, Joseph Lowery, Sidney Poitier, Billie Jean King, Edward Kennedy--also featured Sandra Day O'Connor and Jack Kemp for that proper right wing balance. ("See," Obama says. "I'm not a socialist after all!")

Finally in addition to the posthumous award to Kemp, one went to Harvey Milk. For even the Obama White House thinks its safest to honor dead gay activists--a live one might ask about over-turning DOMA or something.

And the AP ignored even listing the other 8 winners, thereby doing good things like ignoring women's health issues, just like most research organizations (Nancy Goodman Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, got one); ignoring people with Muslim names who help the poor (Muhammad Yunus); and, perhaps most importantly, not getting dragged into the "is Stephen Hawking really British and how did their socialist medicine allow him to live?" brouhaha.

Michael Steele's Unreal New Deal

Here's hoping that UC Chancellor Yudof isn't listening to the new RNC Chair Michael Steele. Cause if he is, I'm out of a job. Then again, Yudof is, too. For here's what Steele said to Wolf Blitzer yesterday on CNN (h/t Crooks & Liars):

BLITZER: But if there's an economic recovery and there are jobs created...

STEELE: Are you taking into account inflation?
And, first off, the government doesn't create jobs. Let's get this notion out of our heads that the government create jobs. Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.

Small business owners do, small enterprises do, not the government. When that government contract runs out, that job goes away. That's what we're talking about here. And those two to four million jobs that are projected won't happen. Trust me.

Of course Blitzer did trust him, not bothering to ask him to explain what those people in the post office are doing, or who those people coming through the national parks in nifty uniforms are. He didn't ask who teaches most of the children in this country. He didn't suggest the people living in the Tennessee Valley might be lacking the authority they need.

For the press isn't right or left, it's stupid at this point. Gregory House couldn't bring it back from brain death even if he made 13 give it mouth-to-mouth.

How the Cokie Crumbles

I'm sort of amazed I haven't ranted about Cokie Roberts in the 4 years I've been blogging for in many ways she's the perfect smarmy symbol of all that's wrong with the Washington press corps--totally insular, completely involved in perpetuating the myth of its own savvy insider know-how, ridiculously wrong about 89% of what they say. That she gets trotted out regularly on NPR is exhibit 1 that NPR isn't liberal in the slightest.

So now we get this, if you missed it. It seems Roberts thinks Obama picked the wrong place to vacation this week. According to TPM:

On ABC's This Week [she] added that Hawaii was not an appropriate destination: too foreign and too exotic. "I know Hawaii is a state, but ..." Roberts declared, while insisting Obama vacation in some place like Myrtle Beach, S.C.

That's one wonderful construction, " I know _____ (noun) is _____ (part of a larger noun it's really part of), but _____ (eyeroll that means we all know better no matter how true silly words are)." Sort of like, "I know Cokie Roberts is a senior news analyst, but..." After all, what better place for the first African-American candidate for President to vacation than the state that still displays the honorable ole Rebel Flag in front of its state house. I hope I'm not stretching my neck out to say that there's no better place for him to do some relaxing.

Roberts didn't think her claim was a mistake, of course. Instead she repeated and deepened it, as she'd heard it before and now it most likely seemed to be received wisdom. Here's her exchange on NPR:

RENEE MONTAGNE: Now Obama is spending the week on vacation in Hawaii, he's taking a vacation, he says, because it's good for his family, but is it a good point in the presidential campaign?

COKIE ROBERTS: It's a little rough to be doing it at this point, although I think he's feeling somewhat secure, but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know, the boy from Kansas and Kenya, and it makes him seem a little bit more exotic than perhaps he would want to come across as at this stage in the presidential campaign.

Nice job, getting "the boy," "Kenya," and "exotic" all within 16 words of each other.

Look can we discuss the candidates' positions on things and not what we learn from their breakfast choice or favorite iPod download (oh, sorry Senator McCain, I realize an iPod is too 21st century for you to understand). As this "insight" gets offered and then repeated by a so-called "expert," we've got McCain going all apoplectic about Russia and Georgia, probably because it seems like something he can relate to--the big bad USSR pushing its neighbors around. Let's talk about that. And how the US of A would never push its neighbors around--it goes halfway around the globe to do that.