The Sunday Funny Pages

Today's Forecast: Mostly Conservative Letters, Followed by Partly-Conservative Op-Eds

First, commentary on some of today's articles:

TNJ ratchets up the noise about Attorney General Beau Biden, placing him squarely in its sights with a huge "exposé" on the number of cases where charges were dropped under his watch. The guy may very well be incompetent - he's young and has no experience as AG, plus his office may be in disarray due to his forced vacation in Iraq for most of his term  -- but I wonder if TNJ would be paying this much attention to him if his name wasn't Biden. Online, TNJ's most unbalanced conservatives are going nuts over this one, although the more rational ones appear to be staying away. Liberal commenter BlueTEa, however, states the following:

How can anyone continue to complain about the NJ being too "liberal" when they present a story this way.
Buried in the text, are the facts that the AG's office has recently seen a doubling in the number of homicide cases taken to trial between 2007 to 2009. Also - that the number of murder cases closed by the AG offices in 2009 was 50 - double the 17 to 25 cases closed each year during the end of the Jane Brady years.
Moreover, the % of homicide cases dropped by Brady's team after indictment was 20% - compared to Biden's 16% over the past 3 years. 
This story is told in a way to sell papers to teabaggers and wingnuts who only read the Headline and look at the pictures.

Well said.

A short AP wire article about Obama reinstating "pay-as-you-go" ends, as do most AP political articles that TNJ selects to print, with the Republican talking point on the subject. Although the bill that Obama signed requires that all spending increases include a corresponding spending cut, a process used during the Clinton years that resulted in surpluses, it also raises the debt ceiling - to keep the U.S. out of default. But the article ends like this:

Republicans mocked Obama for signing the “paygo” bill behind closed doors. “With a simple stroke of his pen, President Obama now has the ability to continue his binge spending agenda to the tune of an additional $1.9 tril­lion, the largest one-time in­crease in our history,” Repub­lican Party Chairman Michael Steele said Friday. “Taxpay­ers will continue to foot the bill for the Democrats’ fiscal irresponsibility.”

The conservatives haven't commented at all on this story, probably because it didn't include any pictures or shiny objects to attract their attention.

An unusually liberal AP wire article that lays out the consequences of not overhauling health care attracts three online conservative comments, all agreeing with other that the current Democratic health care bills need to be thrown out. They all contend that all that's needed to overhaul the health care system is tort reform, no denial of pre-existing conditions, and allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines.

The Letters
Writer #1 questions why one party needs to "show deference" to the other party, and asks "Why should loyalty to the competition be expected?" I'm assuming what he really means is "Why should Republicans do anything the Democrats want? They'd be disloyal to their party if they did." His solution? Eliminate the Democrats and move to a one-party system. Da, comrade.

Writer #2 protests a recent Wilmington law setting buffer zones around clinics offering abortion services, saying it infringes on free speech and "prevents anyone from approaching a desperate mother to offer help and explain alternatives." Apparently this jackass thinks women are too stupid to know that there are alternatives to abortion unless some sidewalk counselor like himself screams in their face. The liberals trounce the religious fanatics in the comments on this one, but then they're fighting with the unarmed.

Letter #3 is a love song to Republican Congressman Mike Castle, telling us he'd make a terrific senator.

Writer #4 complains about both parties, then offers this deep thought: "We all agree that unemploy­ment is a very important issue that also affects a very skiddish (sic) stock market." (TNJ editors were apparently asleep at the wheel the day they got this one.)
The writer offers no solutions and finishes up with this tantalizing final sentence: "Politicians can’t do a states­man-like job if they are con­stantly looking over their shoulder at the next election." Uh... what? Is he proposing we do away with elections, and... what? Descend into anarchy? Maybe institute a monarchy? Establish a dictatorship? Yet another half-baked, meaningless letter using up ink on the editorial pages.

Writer #5 thanks TNJ for its lovely editorial promoting abstinence-only sex ed programs that appeared earlier in the week. 


The Op-Eds

TNJ declares "a pox on both their houses" as it chastises Congress for not being able to pass a meaningful jobs bill. Our editor tells us that "(e)ven last year’s huge stimulus package tended to help govern­ment workers more than those in private industry." Presumably this was written with a straight face. But what really made me stop and go "HUH?"was this jaw-dropper: "More disturbing is the fact that this recession is taking its greatest toll on men." Um... precisely why is this more disturbing? There are still more men than women in the workforce, so it's understandable that more men than women have lost their jobs. Would this (male) editor have found it LESS disturbing if more women than men had lost jobs? I'm willing to bet a big fat "yes" on that one.
What's really hilarious about this editorial is that TNJ moans and cries about party partisanship, while totally ignoring the role it and other members of The Fourth Estate have played in fomenting the current discord and division between the parties. 

TNJ darling George Will tells us that Democrats are trying to get as many people as possible dependent on government. His main gripe is that Democrats don't support government vouchers for private school education. Excuse me, George, but how does asking the government to pay for your private school tuition make you less dependent on government?

Dewayne Wickham takes the Obama administration to task for being proud that joblessness declined for whites and Hispanics in January and ignoring that it rose by three-tenths of 1% for blacks.

David Broder chides both parties for not being able to get along and says the public is fed up with them. Tell us something we don't know, David.

Economist Isabel Sawhill also restates the obvious, telling us that government needs to cut spending and balance the budget. She also believes in pay-as-you-go rules, but "in a more serious way than the weakened form in which they were recently enacted." Sawhill is one of the more liberal members of The Brookings Institute, which TNJ doesn't tells us is a right-wing thinktank.

Stephen C. Fehr, staff writer for Stateline.org, which is a part of the Pew Center on the States, lays out the difficulties states are having in the current recession and predicts they'll probably get worse. The article is neutral, but conservative groups have targeted the Pew Charitable Trusts, which funds Stateline.org, for its funding of what they deem "liberal environmental causes."

The Tuesday Funny Pages

Today's Forecast: Partly-Conservative Letters, Followed by Neutral Op-Eds

Today's Biased Letters to the Editors:

I'm assuming this one is a conservative, because the rant is about "do-gooders" who are ruining everything for everybody with rules and regulations, like making companies print calories on menus and warnings on cigarette packs. Conservative buzz-phrase: "In the meantime, the rest of us pay the bills."

Conservative #2 tells us that we should halve the salaries of all politicians until they start working to earn it. Conservative buzz-phrase: "What would happen if we stopped paying taxes?"

Liberal environmentalist is mad at Obama for his lack of support for the environment. Liberal buzzword: "green."

Liberal writer tells Mike Castle to put a cork in his whine about pork, because if funding comes through for Amtrak, Castle will be first in line to get his photo taken at the ribbon-cutting. Liberal buzz-phrase: "The Party of No."

Conservative thinks Senators and Reps should telecommute instead of living in DC because it would save money and keep them away from the party leadership. Conservative buzz-phrase: "when our country was started."

Today's Op-Eds: A Wash

Four op-eds today, none of which takes an obviously partisan side.

• UD prof Muqtedar Khan teaches us more about Islam. I haven't decided if the NJ has given him a regular column because they want to promote peace and understanding, or because they want to make the conservatives mad. I suspect the latter; if they wanted to promote peace and understanding, they'd put this on the religion page.
• David Broder tells us we're headed for fiscal disaster because nobody on either side has a clue.
• Al Hunt, Washington chief at Bloomberg News,says the same stuff as David Broder, except Al singles out Republican congressman Paul Ryan for having sort of a clue.
• Another Bloomberg Newsian, Celestine Bohlen, piles on Switzerland for allowing tax cheaters to have secret Swiss bank accounts.

The Monday Funny Pages

Today's Forecast: Conservative Letters, Followed by Partly-Liberal Op-Eds

Today the NJ offers us five Letters to the Editor, four of them from conservatives:

Conservative #1 is a National Guard wife whose husband has been deployed to Afghanistan several times, complaining about the paper's coverage of Delaware doctors who went to Haiti. Since this is the second letter in a week from a Guard wife complaining about this, I'm wondering if the Wives' Club had a meeting about it. Her claim that neither the black doctors who went to assist in the disaster nor the black victims of the quake are as worthy of coverage as routine National Guard deployments -- which she says are covered, but only with "a small photo with text of each deployment or return" -- is disturbing on many levels.

Conservative #2 informs us that "Obama’s 'I am not an ideologue' refrain is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” and warns us that Obama and the liberals are out to destroy our country in the next three years with "European-style socialism." He's a little behind the times -- conservatives have been saying this in the blogosphere since the SOTU when Obama said it, but this guy probably heard it the other night when Rick Santorum said it on Fox News.

Conservative #3 tells us that the refusal of unions to accept low wages for its members is the reason all our factories are moving their operations to Mexico.

Conservative #4 is on a rant about the money that might get spent on security for civilian trials of terrorists. Conservatives are terrified of these all-powerful superhuman terrorists, who require a lot more security than American criminals to protect ourselves from them. If I belonged to the Mob, I'd be insulted.

Fruitcake Alert: Letter-writer #5 might be a liberal, because he writes about using wind turbines. But he's proposing using turbines and power lines on railroad lines and superhighway cloverleafs to create a new power grid, which causes me to wonder whether he's got his tinfoil hat on straight.
 
Three Op-Ed pieces today:

Big liberal op-ed piece from Ann Woolner pointing out that conservatives didn't get all tied up in knots when the Bush administration tried Richard Reid as a civilian. Score one column for the libs. 

Today wraps up with one normally-liberal columnist and one normally-conservative columnist writing apolitical columns. Liberal Eugene Robinson writes about his visit to the Washington Car Show and what's wrong at Toyota. Arch-conservative Paul Greenberg tries his hand at creative writing with a mock interview with Holden Caulfield talking about the death of J.D. Salinger.

The Sunday Funny Pages

Today's Forecast: Neutral Letters, Followed by Mostly-Conservative Op-Eds

Today's Biased Letters to the Editor:

Conservative chastises the News Journal for referring to the Senate seat formerly held by Veep Joe Biden as "Joe Biden's seat." This is the second letter of this ilk that we've seen on the NJ Opinion page -- either that, or the NJ liked the first letter so much they reprinted it. A splendid illustration of the apoplexy the name "Biden" generates among certain groups in this state -- they'd probably be happier if the seat was referred to as "the seat formerly held by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." This letter also makes me wonder which Repub-... oops, conservative --talk show host first told their followers that "the seat doesn't doesn't belong to the Bidens, it belongs to the people of Delaware."

Letters to the Editor balance out today with a liberal pointing out that the right-wingnuts currently living in a permanent state of "the economy sucks because of Obama OMG we're all gonna DIE" need to remember that it was 8 years of Republican rule that got us here.

Today's Biased Op-Eds:

Article by Roy C. Smith on how wrong the current administration is in their approach to fixing the banking industry. The NJ tells us that Mr. Smith is a professor at NYU. It doesn't tell us that Mr. Smith was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for more than twenty years before retiring to write books and magazine articles defending investment banker-ing. A tiny samping of Professor Smith's other articles: "Greed Is Good" and "Five Myths About Executive Pay," as well as several articles for The Independent Institute, a libertarian organization whose policy position on the economy is that an unregulated free market will solve everything. Evidently he woke up and smelled the coffee a couple of days ago, though, with an article entitled "How to Protect Taxpayers From the Biggest Banks."

Local Gay Guy Douglas Marshall-Steele tells us gays are mad as hell with Obama and everybody else and aren't gonna take it any more, and vaguely threatens revolution. The real story here is that as of late Sunday morning, not one comment has been posted online in response to it.

Uber-conservative George Will rounds out today's funny pages with an article showcasing his rich fantasy life as he forecasts life in 2013, when our next president is Mitch Daniels and our new Veep is Paul Ryan. Yeah, "Who?" was also the first thing that popped into my mind. Apparently these geniuses -- actually a former Illinois governor and a former Wisconsin congressman -- are going to get elected by virtue of an innovative approach to solving our economic woes, one so bold and new that Will calls Ryan a one-man think tank for dreaming it up, and anoints him as living, breathing proof that Repuglicans actually have Ideas with a capital I. His Idea? Wait for it... A FLAT INCOME TAX. Now, that made me wonder: has Will got his Pauls mixed up? Did he maybe say Paul Ryan when he really meant Ron Paul? No, Ryan's idea is new and different -- it's a 2-tiered flat tax, which nobody has ever thought of before. 10% for poor people and 25% for rich folks. But here's the real kicker: it will guarantee "universal access to the health care system." New. Different. Genius.

The Saturday Funny Pages

Today's Forecast: Conservative Letters, Followed by Neutral Op-Eds

Today's Biased Letters to the Editor:

The NJ revives that reliable old chestnut sure to generate lots of comment, global warming, with the usual crank letter, this time from a "Mr. Whipple" in Middletown. Mr. Whipple states unequivocally that there's no such thing as global warming because NOAA says "the aver­age temperature in 2009 was only '1.01 degree F above the 20th-cen­tury average.'"

Continuing the crazy old fart rant, we have a letter from a disgruntled Repub-... oops, I mean conservative... who wants to point out that our current governor is responsible for the sorry fiscal mess Delaware is in right now because he was treasurer under Minner. Of course, Delaware's current situation has absolutely nothing to do with George Bush running the entire US economy into the toilet, does it? Nah.

Today's Biased Op-Eds:
 The Delaware Voice column is a conservative hymn in praise of St. Ronald - Reagan, that is - from a former Reagan appointee to some obscure committee I've never heard of, now living in Rehoboth Beach and dreaming of glories past. 

Chuck Raasch's neutral column reports on Obama's Q&A with Republicans in Baltimore last week and what various commentators are saying about it.

Liberal columnist Margaret Carlson points out that Sarah Palin is a hypocrite (duh) because she hasn't jumped all over Rush Limbaugh for repeatedly using the word "retard" in a rant against "political correctness," although when Rahm Emmanuel said it (once) last week, she tore him a new one.