and Steve Benen!

Love the posts. Love the format. More information, more pith. Used to visit Tim Grieve's posts several times a day. Salon, keep Steve on, and I'll do that again.

this is truly disturbing. The Media Matters page side-by-side analysis is jaw-dropping. It's one thing to make fun of someone with obvious methods - poodle suits included - and completely another to secretly manipulate head shots of your targets for subliminal purposes. That's propaganda 101, and it makes all of Fox's communication suspect. Any news channel that foists that on their public deserves to be exposed as bottom-feeders.

for the quality reporting, vivid and upbeat too. You've got a new reader at The Carpetbagger Report. Almost Independence Day!

To New Yorker editor David Remnick:

If you have to explain why a joke is funny, it's not. I've read the New Yorker for 30 years, and this is the stupidest thing they've done since hiring Tina Brown.

and point well taken. The covers are usually, "killing them softly with refined whimsy"; this is closer to fragging. Why the hell does the New Yorker have to pick THIS election to get "provocative"? Good grief.

Three candidates go into a bar.....

McCain is wearing silk Pajamas with a "Hanoi Hilton" logo on the pocket and arms tied into a straightjacket. He is foaming at the mouth. Obama is dressed as Bin Laden with a fake beard and 11" tent in his lower robe. He is french kissing the petite white barmaid. Mayor Bloomberg is wearing an Israeli special forces job, a set of horns and an I-HEART-BILDERBERG pin on his cap.

Which one has the dead baby between his teeth?

It's funny, right?

This is why the New Yorker cover is really, really stupid: it's handed the enemy a loaded gun. No matter what the "intention" was, any ham-fisted smear-merchant won't have to invent the image of his dreams. They can just point to a liberal magazine and say, "well they loaded the damn thing, not us".

It's not about the first amendment - that seems in place for the time being, certainly on these pages. It's not about whether anyone has the right to object to the content of another's speech, or even to their objection - that's an American chestnut. It's about whether or not you feel this election needs to be slathered in "irony" and satire, or whether you think we might just be hurting enough to care about the outcome, deeply. If it's the former, you can be as Mandarin as you like. If the latter, and you pay attention to the fact that the image is already being used as a right-wing email magnet, the joke is flat.

And let's face it - how easy is it to get all satiric about a racial group that doesn't make up the majority of the magazine's masthead in the first place? Not to mention the letter writers herein.

Yes, Bush took our humor down a notch, but I'm not going to worry about that; our humor will bounce back. I'm going to worry about immediate action on global warming, jump starting the economy with green technology, decent health care, and getting us out of an illegal and supremely immoral war. The NY cover isn't immoral, just tin-eared.

And oh yes - I care deeply about getting the first African-American elected president, especially since he's such an inspiring candidate, warts and all. I care about breaking down that unbelievable racial barrier, and the profound things it could mean for this country's insoluble racial stalemate. (Would that it could have been a black woman - Barbara Jordan comes to mind.) But it's July - we've got 4 months to make asses of ourselves. What's the rush?

"My gosh what an aweful lot of name calling. The argument here seems to be that if you are offended by the cover you can't see the joke, and if you can't see the joke you are some how brain-dead and lacking a sense of humour.

Whether the joke is funny or not is really beside the point.

The minstrel shows were funny as hell. They were also racist and hateful. The Hillary Nutcracker was funny, and it was misogynistic and un-fair. It is a time honored practice of white Patriarchy to defend itself from criticism by impugning the sense of humor (and by extension the humanity) of women and people of color.

The New Yorker is not being threatened by government sanction or violence, but by public criticism which they must have forseen.

-- blaurza"

Perfectly put.

Karl Rove is single-handedly responsible for plotting some of the lowest points in this country's trajectory of the last few decades. That covers everything from 2004 vote manipulation, to politicizing Katrina's struggling recovery, to the vile personal lies he circulated about McCain in 2000. Rove (and Cheney) are as close to pure devildom as we have in our midst.

The fact that Rove is now on McCain's payroll is the only thing you have to know - McCain is a lost soul, a two-faced liar and a walking tragedy. And he will carry the devils right back into the White House with him, should we be that unfortunate.

The fact that Palin is tacitly acceptable to Rove is all you need to know about her.

Now that's just silly - you know you don't believe that. But don't let that stop you from posting more nonsense, if that's your job. Man's gotta make a living.