not one quote from one player, either Major or Minor league, about showing solidarity with their fellow union members (albeit from a different union, but still.)

Ballplayers have never struck in solidarity with anyone, for that matter, because they don't, i suspect, feel solidarity with the working man and woman.

and that is sad.

plus, the kids today...but that goes without saying.

the problem is one of money and power. and it is hardly exclusive to republicans. there has literally been no rock turned over by, for instance, eliot spitzer over the past 6 years that hasn't found cockroaches. the highest levels of wall street in arbitrage, finance, mortgage practice, the insurance industry and so on. all levels of government, from abramoff to the K Street generation. our legal system (as inevitably we will find at the end of this train wreck with gonzales et al).

our elites are obsessed with nothing but money and getting ahead for themselves ("feather the nest and fuck the rest" to quote Killing Joke). it's most of them. it's endemic to our current system of rapacious capitalism with no brakes. i think it happens to dovetail nicely with authoritarian republicanism of the modern sort, but that is more of a happy coincidence for republicans than it is necessary.

people think they need religion (another area of elite corruption) for morality, but quite the opposite is true--we need moral and ethical behavior from the bottom up (the internet is a great place for that) and from the top down (a whole new generation of non-scumbag leadership of an party).

this man tenet threw away a life of service to his country in order to curry favor with people he now claims to have known were liars and cheats. after he had let them use his credibility like a piece of toilet paper in order to go to a war of choice (his words) he accepted an accolade with a smile on his face from those people.

later, he made a high-six figure advance to write a book about how he knew all along and how it was a Very Bad Thing.

truly there are no people more loathsome than the current elite in this country, perfectly encompassed for me by the behavior of that sad sack of a shell of an empty-suit of a human being George Tenet. giving back his medal would be even more too little, even later.

National journalists, because they and their lives and careers are so integrally woven into that system, instinctively believe the former. And that, more than anything else, renders them incapable of fulfilling the core journalistic function, which is to report on our government adversarially and to view it as a target of scepticism. They are far too integrated into it and dependent upon it to do anything other than view it as intrinsically good and therefore reflexively defend it. And that is true no matter how many foreign outside-of-the-Beltway excursions David Broder courageously undertakes. They are spokespeople for the royal court of which they (and typically their spouses and friends and close associates) are such a critical part.

well, yes, all true, but it doesn't take into account the underlying issues that make Bush 43 different than clinton. it's about money, of course. republicans generally feel more comfortable with wealth, and the media and beltway elite now have been coopted (by the very corporate culture that in turn gives money to politicians to keep that culture un or de-regulated). it didn't used to be possible to get paid 1 million dollars a year to write for a national newsweekly. it didn't used to be possible for the media, even the elite amongst them, to buy the GOOD houses on Nantucket. it was part of a different class. i think you find that striving middle class union members (e.g., the media of 1950-1990) was a very different beast from the media of 1990-now, and the main difference is that all the money they can make reflexively makes republican arguments about taxes (and distancing oneself from social responsibility) make much sense, as if by some kind of magic.

but it's an essential element of co-optation, and on some level i'm sure people knew what was going on. the joe klein of the late 60s might have called it selling out--the joe klein of today would call it buying in.

circulation might rise if the times acknowledged that its readership could increase if it moved to the left, and started dropping some of the fake balance that forces the paper to buy into conventional wisdom. instead, it tries not to alienate what the sulzbergers et al obviously think is their real base--opinion makers and talking heads in DC and NY.

there aren't that many of those people--as an economic strategy, it's a loser. the numbers of readers of atrios, yourself, kos, and several other left blogs suggest a yearning for a different kind of coverage from the Times--reality based, without a smothering faux-centrist perspective draped across every article about DC politics, and with less of a rah-rah business push.

i guess that will have to be someone else's newspaper, but it's too bad that the Times can't pick up that mantle.

i can only imagine how unserious and out-of-bounds it must be to in any begin to even conceive of possibly thinking that perhaps, just maybe, just a tiny little bit we might question our pro-israel policies. let's go further--you can't even debate those within the context of being for them! no no, you simply must march in lockstep with the most recidivist of views on such matters to have any entree in FPC circles.

i know GG has swatted this one down before but it bears repeating--we have a pro-war ideology that demands that its adjuncts and satrapies continue to fight our wars on our behalf at all times.