Via Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped, I see Robert Greenwald‘s Brave New Films has a new release out about the pornification of Fox News. I’m dubious that Greenwald’s effort to petition for the unbundling of Fox from cable news packages is energy well spent, but the video is good:
There’s plenty of things to criticize about Fox, and pervasive smuttiness standing alone doesn’t rise to the same levels of gross journalistic misconduct as so much else of what Fox does. But it’s the Fox smut–which I use broadly to include not just jiggly blondes but crime coverage, celebrity scandal and the like–juxtaposed with the hard-right political skew of Roger Ailes that makes Fox so repulsive.
When it came to Rudy Giuliani’s claim that he made “hundreds of thousands” of decisions as mayor, one of our readers just couldn’t help himself …
I’m sorry, I can’t help it.
Rudy was mayor for 2,920 days. There are 24 hours in a day. Because Rudy is a dedicated public servant, he works 14 hours a day as mayor; that gives him eight hours to sleep and two hours to shower and dress, and for quiet contemplation (because Rudy is also a very deep guy).
So:
If he made 200,000 decisions as mayor, that’s 68.4 decisions every day, or 4.9 decisions every working hour. That’s a decision every 12 minutes, 15 seconds.
If he made half a million decisions as mayor, that’s 171 decisions every day, or 12.2 decisions every working hour. That’s a decision every four minutes, 54 seconds.
And if he made 900,000 decisions as mayor, that’s 308.2 decisions every day, or 22 decisions every working hour. And that, of course, would be more than one decision every three minutes; actually, a decision every two minutes, 43 seconds.
Amazing.
Okay, I’m done now.
So Bernie Kerik is finally getting indicted. And now the Giuliani campaign really gets interesting. I have no doubt we’ll be bringing you a lot more on this in the coming days. But there’s just one point I want to flag now.
Rudy Giuliani’s response to all the renewed controversy over Kerik has been to say that making Bernie Kerik police commissioner was just one mistake out of hundreds of thousands of good decisions. (Two, I guess, if you count the decision to try to make him Secretary of DHS.)
But look closely at how this line of reasoning matches up with the other key argument Rudy is making for his candidacy.
Rudy claims that his qualification for the presidency stems from his management of 9/11 and his experience having “the safety and security of the people of New York on my shoulders.” I’ve noted more than a few times now that this is a rather grandiose conception of the mayoralty of any city. But the only sense in which it has any basis is that in New York (as in many cities) the mayor is in charge of and ultimately accountable for the police department. So who you choose to put in charge of the police department isn’t just one of hundreds of thousands of decisions. It is both by simple logic and Rudy’s own reasoning probably the most important decision you can make.
And what did Giuliani do? Let’s set aside all of the Kerik run-of-mill corruption and the fact that he used a Battery Park apartment donated as a rest area for cops and rescue workers working at Ground Zero as his own personal love shack to boff Judith Regan and sundry other ladies of glamor and renown. Set all that fun stuff aside and realize that Rudy not only appointed a crooked, mobbed-up cop to be in charge of the NYPD. There is now abundant evidence that Rudy knew of Kerik’s mob ties before appointing him.
Just boil it down and say it: when it came time to choose a police commissioner Rudy chose a crooked, mobbed up cop. And he was warned about it all in advance.
That isn’t just one decision among hundreds of thousands. It’s one of such recklessness, irresponsibility and even a hard-to-figure indifference to criminal conduct that, just on the terms upon which Rudy has asked voters to judge his candidacy, it should pretty much end his campaign in its tracks.
Earlier today I asked how much of the current run-up in oil prices was due to White House saber-rattling on Iran. The answer seems to be some, but it’s more an accelerant than a cause. The basic reasons seem to be a mix of old fashioned supply and demand on the one hand and the collapse in the value of the dollar on the other. But a little number-crunching we did today — lining up the price of oil against some of President Bush’s more incendiary comments on Iran — showed there is at least a correlation. You see a many month trend of rising oil prices, a long updraft. But a number of the key spikes — the sudden run-ups rather than the rising tide — do seem to come just after President Bush’s saber-rattling statements.
We’ll try to put some of the data together for you in graph form tomorrow.
Also of interest on this topic is this article in Friday’s Times which points to the highly salient fact that this is the first oil shock that is demand-based rather than supply-based. The simple fact is that the global energy system can’t survive if people in China and India live lives like people in America and Europe. Let alone issues of sustainability and global warming — there’s just not enough oil to go around. Over time spiraling prices will lead to more investment and eventually more supply. But the experts don’t seem to think supply can come close to keeping up with demand.
So the President was down in San Antonio today, visiting the rehab center at Brooke Army Medical Center, where lots of wounded Iraq War vets go for further treatment.
As is usually the case in these kinds of visits, the President took a tour, shook some hands, and gave a speech. But we got a hold of a copy of the pool report of the visit, and the President apparently also got a chance to play a little virtual soldier on his tour:
Bush saw a number of cutting edge virtual reality games that allowed recovering soldier to simulate riding a car or boat. One game simulated shooting in a Baghdad neighborhood, a game she said POTUS participated in with two other soldiers there and helped shoot the bad guys, at least virtually.
That must have been quite a scene. I wonder how it went over.
Breaking: Bhutto placed under house arrest. According to the AP, police have surrounded her home in Islamabad.
So let’s run through a little arithmetic. Mukasey went through last night by a vote of 53-40. Forty, of course, is a pretty significant number in terms of sustaining a filibuster. So who were the Dems who didn’t show up? Were they likely ‘no’ on Mukasey votes? I would say so: Biden, Clinton, Dodd and Obama. The presidentials. It’s true that many people will vote ‘no’ on a floor vote who won’t vote the same way to sustain a filibuster. And in the best of all worlds I don’t think we should be operating in a world where the need to get to 60 votes is the norm rather than the exception. But the Republicans are not letting anything through without 60 votes in the Congress. So I find it very odd how this went down.
I stick with what I suggested the last couple days. This could have been blocked. Had one of the presidentials — say, Dodd — announced that he would have forced a cloture vote, the others would have scurried to catch up.