This was over at Crooks and Liars, so is widely read. But it is so bad that I am putting it up here and adding our three readers to C&L’s.

Here’s Glenn Beck:

“If you’re a guy, you can get past it. I don’t think you can as an ugly woman.”

“You’ve got a double cross, because if you’re an ugly woman, you’re probably a progressive as well.”

Beck later added:

“If you believed in God, you’d know that there’s going to be another chance for you. You don’t have to be ugly in heaven. You’re going to be your perfect self, and there will be another perfect somebody waiting for you on the other side.”

Here is what I don’t get – the guy is obviously a cold and cruel jerk, and a moron to boot. Why does he have a show on CNN?

I think Dave Budge and I touched on it a bit in the post below on how mainstream news networks do such a lousy job. CNN is in a ratings battle with FOX and others. They need numbers. It’s not about IQ. That’s the last thing they care about. They want those right wing butts sitting on those couches. After all, TV is just a way of selling audiences to advertisers.

So they bring on the biggest right wing jackass they can find, one not comported to normal decency, one given to saying outrageous things, even if only to draw viewers.

It’s marketing to our lowest common denominator. It’s why the free market can’t deliver a decent product to the public. Our tastes are determined by the dumbest jackasses among us.

Beck is the lowest of sleazeballs to occupy the front lines of mainstream media – an extremely shallow religious freak.

But my – isn’t he a handsome man?

Well, since we are reduced to flinging videos at at one another, here’s the latest. It’s Hillary’s lame attempt to be part of it all. It wouldn’t be so funny if they weren’t trying to be serious.

On the other side of the coin, I was working yesterday, doing some dull, repetitive stuff, so I went looking for some background noise. What I found was this – a news broadcast from Democracy Now! As I was listening to it, it slowly dawned … I was listening to a real discussion of candidates and their stances. No glitz, no videos, no horse race – just a serious dissection of where Clinton and Obama stand on health care reform.

Democracy Now! is often the object of condescension, as it is a lefty network, but it also does something all of the mainstreams forgot how to do – journalism. I have watched a lot of CNN lately – it’s all horse race. DN! doesn’t fear boring its viewership, I suppose. They are not worried they will bail and head over to FOX. And truthfully, they do run some pretty frightful stuff. Code Pink is often featured.

But they also try hard to give good and hard coverage of current events. And they do other stuff – who else would ask John Edwards’s campaign manager to go on opposite Ralph Nader? Or ask him about Edwards’ conservative voting record or his stint with a hedge fund after his election loss in 2004? Who would cover Noam Chomsky’s latest speech (Mr. PNG -persona non grata)? Or East Timor, about to blow up again? Or labor news, long absent from mainstream and local coverage?

No one else. If I watched nothing but Democracy Now!, I would be better informed than if I watched only CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX, or certainly if I only read the local paper.

Now, back to Hillary’s video. Let’s rock and roll with the C-Woman. (Be sure to take note of the sax player – a Bill-clone? Good grief.)

One of the first signs that winter is going to end is that day in February when pitchers and catchers report. We have a foot of snow outside and the wind has been howling, moving the snow around, making rock-hard drifts. The sun rarely shines – it’s usually overcast here in Bozeman. Winter will linger until April, and we won’t have a true green spring until May.

Except today … the Cincinnati Reds and all the other teams are now in camp. Many players have been there all week – the young guns who want to show up and impress the manager. Get this – some of them come early just because they love to play the game.

The Reds have a young outfielder, Jay Bruce, who is ranked the number one prospect in all of baseball. He’s been in Sarasota all week.

Last year the Reds finished 72-90, fired their manager, and played the last month of the season with basically a triple-A roster. Yet they started out in April of 2007 with the same optimism as now. But losing started early – it takes a couple of months for weaknesses to be exposed, but not that long for the 2007 Reds. They lacked two things – starting pitching and bullpen arms. No amount of hitting overcomes bad pitching. By the All Star break they were deep in the hole, and the manager had to go. Like he was the problem.

This winter they signed a closer, Francisco Cordera, to a monstrous contract, and also nabbed a potential starter in former Colorado Rocky Jeremy Affeldt. They traded away a brilliant young outfielder, Josh Hamilton, for a promising young arm, Edinson Volquez, and hired Dusty Baker to manage. Once again, there is hope. Their record right now is 0-0, and they are tied for first. It is February, I’m slogging through tax work, but pitchers and catchers report today. I’m excited.

We are going to San Francisco in late April, staying in a beach condo and babysitting a friend’s pooch for a while. If that wasn’t enough, I checked the schedule, and sure enough, the Reds are in Frisco at that time. If that wasn’t enough, our friend has a friend who has box seats who won’t be using the tickets … it was is if it were foreordained.

That’s something to look forward to this dark February morning. Talk of steroids and congressional hearings will soon give way to balls and strikes and dingers. Baseball fans are not complicated. We’re not so noisy as football fans – baseball is actually boring to many of them. I can see that. It’s a game without a time clock – a game made for lazy afternoons. Football became popular in an industrialized country where people had to punch clocks. It’s a different mindset.

On this dark and cold February morning I look forward to 162 three hour contests, each one uniquely important. This could be the year.

What are we to make of a man with a conservative voting record that rivals only that of Hillary Clinton, who ran as a liberal, dropped out at a most inopportune moment, and now supposedly will endorse Hillary Clinton.

Sounds like a stalking horse to me. But my mind is not trained not to think like that.

It’s only the primaries, but something unmistakable is going on. In each contest tonight, forget about Hillary, Barack Obama outpolled the entire Republican field.

And John McCain, the brave man who bombed North Vietnamese civilians, is always shorter than the people around him. Maybe just symbolic of a moral pygmy, maybe significant.

From Glenn Greenwald:

The Senate today — led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus — will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration’s years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans. The long, hard efforts by AT&T, Verizon and their all-star, bipartisan cast of lobbyists to grease the wheels of the Senate — led by former Bush 41 Attorney General William Barr and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick — are about to pay huge dividends, as such noble efforts invariably do with our political establishment.

What is interesting about this is the Silence of the Blogs. They’re running Obama-put-to-music clips as the real business of the Democratic Party goes on without notice.

Keep in mind too – this is always true – a vote is not a vote if it doesn’t change anything. A vote in favor of a bill they know will fail or be vetoed means nothing – only the vote to override a veto has substance, and that only if successful. Democrats are great at playing cat and mouse with us. With a few notable exceptions, it’s very hard to know where any of them really stand.

For instance, on the telecom bill, twelve of them are selling out. That’s the required number. But what if they needed thirteen? The thirteenth vote is most assuredly there, hiding in the bushes. It’s Bob Dole’s axiom of politics: You can never go wrong voting for a bill that fails or against one that passes.

UPDATE: Far more than the necessary 12 Democrats bolted and joined the president in granting immunity to the telecoms. Here’s a list of the deserters:

Bayh, Inouye, Johnson, Landrieu, McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Stabenow, Feinstein, Kohl, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Carper, Mikulski, Conrad, Webb, and Lincoln. Obama voted against immunity, and Hillary Clinton was the only Senator not voting.

As always, Obama’s vote might mean something, might mean nothing. See the Bob Dole axiom above.

The bill can be stopped in the house. Go here to sign a petition urging them to stop it.

From Dog Owners Quarterly:

The peril of any utopianism, of course, is how it suspends rationality and pursues a dream. In the case of millennial American conservatism, the political dream, for all its responsiveness to the tangible self-interest of rich constituencies, has been the illusion of markets as potential parliaments rather than descendants of carnivals, as rational decision-makers rather than precarious litmuses of human nature. (Kenvin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy)

I often get into it with right-wing-free-market fundamentalists. It’s not a pleasant experience, but it is illuminating. For one thing, these Randians treat us all with disdain, as if we simply cannot grasp their elemental genius. For another, they are impervious to experience. Every incidence of failure of markets to satisfy the greater good or basic human needs is turned back in our face: It’s government’s fault. Their ideal world is one where government is reduced to a few basic tasks: Deliver our mail, protect our shores, and stay the hell out of our lives.

So we see now on a charred landscape with wide swaths of destruction. It was brought about by feverish lending and borrowing and a speculative bubble. From this we are to conclude that markets are intelligent and should be left to their own? Not hardly. Markets are like fire – they can both serve us and destroy us, keep us warm and burn us to a crisp. As with fire, markets serve us best when regulated.

In the current crisis there are many culprits, and a lot of finger pointing is going on. Generally, from the right, it’s home borrowers getting the finger. And indeed, they did get sucked in – they did refinance to spend their home equity on consumer goods and pay down their high-interest credit card debt. They did fall for teaser rates and take on financial obligations beyond their ability to repay. They were not exactly smart borrowers. And they should pay a price.

On the other hand, we have the lenders, and in general, the repeal of the New Deal. In the wake of the Great Depression a large number of regulatory protections were put in place to keep the financial sector from flaring and burning, as it is known to do.

Economist Robert Kuttner:

[today we have what we would] call securitization of credit. Some people think this is a recent innovation, but in fact it was the core technique that made possible the dangerous practices of the 1920. Banks would originate and repackage highly speculative loans, market them as securities through their retail networks, using the prestigious brand name of the bank – e.g. Morgan or Chase – as a proxy for the soundness of the security. It was this practice, and the ensuing collapse when so much of the paper went bad, that led Congress to enact the Glass-Steagall Act, requiring bankers to decide either to be commercial banks – part of the monetary system, closely supervised and subject to reserve requirements, given deposit insurance, and access to the Fed’s discount window; or investment banks that were not government guaranteed, but that were soon subjected to an extensive disclosure regime under the SEC.

Since repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, after more than a decade of de facto inroads, super-banks have been able to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s – lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way. And, much of this paper is even more opaque to bank examiners than its counterparts were in the 1920s. Much of it isn’t paper at all, and the whole process is supercharged by computers and automated formulas. An independent source of instability is that while these credit derivatives are said to increase liquidity and serve as shock absorbers, in fact their bets are often in the same direction – assuming perpetually rising asset prices – so in a credit crisis they can act as net de-stabilizers.

It’s not like blaming this president or that one will help us now, but if we must place blame, it falls on the shoulders of Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan. Clinton gave us Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who ushered through repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, a post-depression piece of legislation that prevented conflicts of interest in lending, among other things. When Rubin left the administration, in a colossal conflict of interest, he became chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, which was an enormous beneficiary of the repeal of Glass Steagall.

Citigroup would both originate home loans and allow borrowers extremely high leverage, and at the same time repackage those loans as securities. It’s a nice scheme that looks a lot like what we did in the 1920’s with other securities, and it works fine in a speculative bubble, but comes falling down when housing prices decline. Greenspan, for his part, kept interest rates so low as to perpetuate the bubble. He should have seen it, should have stopped it. It was only his job.

It could have been prevented, should have been prevented. We had the tools, but since the time of Jimmy Carter we have been either ignoring these tools or repealing the laws that gave them to us.

Which brings us back to Randian capitalism, unfettered markets, and what Phillips called “the illusion of markets as potential parliaments rather than descendants of carnivals.” The question before us now is do we have the political will to reimpose discipline on markets? Are the Democrats part of the solution or part of the problem?

Hillary Clinton, whose husband presided over deregulation that caused the problem, offers us nothing beyond the current stimulus package – no re-regulation, no discipline to be imposed on markets. Same song and dance. Nothing of substance comes from Barack Obama either. There’s nothing, of course, from McCain and the Republicans. That’s our most basic fundamental flaw: When both parties are captive of the same financial interests, neither has the will to impose the discipline necessary not just to remedy the immediate problem, but also to enact the long term structural fixes that need be made.

Let’s eat, drink, and enjoy our tax rebates. There is no fix in sight. The coming election is about nothing in particular. The Democrats are not your father’s Democrats. They don’t have the political will to do the real fixing that needs to be done.

Pitchers and catchers report in eight days. In the meantime, baseball fans are bored. The question asked this morning at my favorite baseball blog was this: Which movie did you most anticipate that most disappointed you?

These are mostly young people at the blog, and they have heard a lot about great movies from the past. So they have rented or purchased them, and were deeply disappointed. It’s an interesting glimpse into the minds of younger movie lovers.

Generally, the reason given for not liking a movie from years ago is that it is boring. And indeed, people these days are used to heavy editing and rapid scene-shifting. But they are also inundated with special effects and violence has risen to new levels. But many movies that were big hits years ago were also pretentious and too-cool, and simply don’t stand up well.

Anyway, here’s what young people think of movies we (well some of us) thought were cool:

The Shining: Not nearly so scary now as then. What’s changed?

The Graduate: Mass market soundtracks were relatively new, and Simon and Garfunkle caught a wave, but this movie is tiresome and tedious.

Birth of a Nation: My oh my – was racism so common back then? I’ve heard enough about this movie to be happy never seeing it, but the theme was ordinary in its time. How we have grown!

Psycho: This movie actually was remade in 1998, scene for scene, line for line, and really did bomb. But when it originally came out in 1960, it scared people. The shower scene is often mentioned as classic. It’s fairly mundane.

Easy Rider: Reading a little too much into hippie communes and bikers, type-casting rednecks. There was not much there there.

Cannonball Run: Meant to be a slapstick comedy, it fails to raise a yuck when watched today. $5.00 at WalMart, and worth every penny.

Billy Jack: A man of peace kicks the crap out of everyone he hates. Maybe a prequel to Kung Fu, the terrible TV show about a martial arts expert in the cowboy west.

Star Wars I, II, III. These movies answer the question in reverse: they would have kicked ass in 1975.

The Big Lebowski: A snoozer that was supposed to be funny?

Dr. Zhivago: Shot in North Dakota at a time when Russia was a dark and foreboding place. Loooooong love story, schloppy theme song that sold many 45’s.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Great vehicle for two cool guys of their time that happened to be a western that happened to mention two historical characters.

Thelma and Louise: Yeah, well, so what?