If there was a contest each week for the dumbest comment made by a member of the media, this would likely be last week's prohibitive favorite.

On the syndicated Chris Matthews Show this weekend, during a discussion about Barack Obama's America-hating Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page actually said with a straight face, "Right-wing wouldn't have that story if it wasn't for the mainstream media" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Well Kathleen, obviously it got blown out of the water, the Obama people clearly love it coming out this week, right? They loved it.

KATHLEEN PARKER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Absolutely.

MATTHEWS: And everybody jumped on it. But there are people on the Obama side afraid that in the end, you can play the ethnic card, that foreign card, are they afraid that it will work against him?

PARKER: Sweetie, I don't think a Mormon is going to play the foreign card. That's dangerous stuff.

MATTHEWS: That’s a homegrown religion.

PARKER: The [unintelligible] are not going to go into the black church. This is not Mitt Romney’s approach to things. And of course, he's, he has no control over…

MATTHEWS: What about the Sean Hannity piece? Hannity was right on that, we just saw him this week, Thursday night saying go for it, go out and use this stuff.

PARKER: Well, yeah, Sean Hannity wants him to. A lot of Republicans do and a lot of the sort of further right people feel like, look, we never vetted Obama sufficiently. Talking about us, the media. And to some extent they're not wrong about that. They do feel that we kind of pulled back on Reverend Wright. It was sort of like President Obama will not, then candidate Obama said, “Yes, I was, you know, I was in his church for 20 years but I'm not responsible for what he says and I can't say that characterizes me.”

CLARENCE PAGE, CHICAGO TRIBUNE: ABC reported Reverend Wright, by the way. We ought to remember that. Mainstream media, right-wing wouldn't have that story if it wasn't for the mainstream media.

---

Really?

According to LexisNexis, the first mention of "Jeremiah Wright" by ABC was on Good Morning America on March 13, 2008, just five days before Obama gave his race speech in Philadelphia.

Prior to this point, despite what Page said, the media had largely boycotted the junior senator from Illinois' affiliation with the Trinity Church and its America-hating reverend.

It was only until conservative media members pushed this issue far enough that the Obama-loving press were forced to cover the story, and the candidate himself had to respond to it.

Way out in front of everyone on this subject was Fox News's Sean Hannity who interviewed Wright on March 1, 2007, one day after breaking the story about Obama's ties to Trinity:

As such, Hannity was more than a year ahead of virtually all of the mainstream media on this subject, leading other conservative talk show hosts as well as bloggers to follow suit.

For Page to now claim the MSM were responsible for bringing the right-wing this story is preposterous, and will likely give Hannity quite a chuckle on Monday.

More importantly, Obama-lovers in the press that clearly didn't want to discuss Wright in 2008 don't want to now.

As such, their play is going to be similar to Page's claiming that this was all addressed in the previous election cycle and therefore old news.

They will also depict any media outlet or Super PAC raising this issue as racist.

Anything they can do to get Obama reelected.

CARTOON BY KEN CATALINO

STOP OBAMA IN 2012! GET YOUR Defeat Obama in 2012 WIDGET. FOLLOW LINK FOR DETAILS.

"The problem was, they were so pleased with this arrangement that they kept him until June 1947. He was among the last Germans to be repatriated."

Gute Nacht to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Or is it walla walla walla?

I saw a movie once, probably twenty years ago, in which one character is a Hollywood old-timer who's known in the biz as the World's Greatest Extra. Another character says, awestruck, "He invented the 'Courtroom Walla'!" It's explained that in courtroom dramas, when the verdict is announced, everyone in the courtroom softly says, "walla walla walla," creating a nice, low-level hum of excitement without anything really discernible in it.

Or are they just saying murmur....



Is the word "murmur" onomonopia? OED says:

Etymology: Partly < Middle French, French murmure indistinct expression of feeling by a number of people (c1170 in Old French), subdued expression of discontent (c1200), muted noise (c1230), sound of a light breeze (1555), respiratory murmur (1819 in passage translated in quot. 1821 at sense 5) < murmurer murmur v.; and partly < its ultimate etymon classical Latin murmur a low, continuous sound, a subdued or indistinct utterance, such an utterance indicative of anger or resentment, a reduplicated imitative formation....

The answer seems to be partly.

**Posted by Phineas

The Obama campaign, including their allies in the media, have tried their best to make Mitt Romney’s time at turnaround investment company Bain Capital a negative for him, portraying him as a heartless, greedy capitalist. (1)

The IBD’s Michael Ramirez parries those attacks with one simple cartoon that compare Romney’s record as a CEO to Obama’s as president:

(Click Michael’s name for a larger version)

As they say, ’nuff said.

And be sure to check out Michael’s archive at IBD; he’s the best conservative political cartoonist in the business these days and one of the best, ever.

Footnote:
(1) Sadly, some Republicans helped give them ammunition. And let’s not speak of Obama’s corporate donors and the rewards they get; that would be racist.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

That's the question for the man who's trying to oust Scott Walker in the recall election, and Mike Gousha asked it straight to Tom Barrett's face on his show "Up Front." Video at the link. This is my transcription:

I would have done it the same way I've balanced 8 consecutive budgets for the city of Milwaukee. I would set priorities, and as the mayor of the city of Milwaukee, I've always set priorities, particularly as they related to public safety, and at the state level, I would set priorities as they relate to education, because we saw the largest cut ever in education in the state's history, 30% cut for the technical schools, university took big hits....

The question was how would you deal with the deficit, and Barrett goes right toward ideas about spending more! He's muttering out this list of things and Gousha jumps in with: "So you want to restore all that?" Barrett — whose face remains impassive — says:

Well, it's not going to be restored overnight...

He totally misses the cue in Gousha's question, which was: You're supposed to tell us how to cut the deficit! Instead, Barrett falls more deeply into the idea of how will we get back what Scott Walker took away. He goes on:

... and I have to be honest with the people: You can't restore all those cuts overnight, but that would be my priority.

So, he plans to erase the deficit by setting priorities, and his "priority" is restoring "all the cuts"!

And I want the people of the state to know that my funding priority for the next budget will be education. But I also would not have started out... We were in a hole, according to Scott Walker.

That ellipsis doesn't signify any words left out. Barrett stopped in the middle of a thought and switched to Walker's metaphor of "a hole."

And so, when you're in a hole, what's the first thing you do?

The old cliché. Thanks, Tom. When you're in a hole, stop digging. Oh! Apparently not:

The first thing you do is try to get out of the hole.

The only thing worse than a cliché is to miss the cliché. It's a telling miss, because Barrett seems blind to the obvious fact that to save money you have to save money. So yeah, the first thing you do is try to get out of the hole. Hello? So there was a huge hole in the budget, and you would just try to get out of it. Well, you did get out of it, when you lost the election to Walker in 2010. And Walker didn't try to get out of it. He didn't even just stop digging. He filled the hole! And now, for all we can see, Tom Barrett wants to re-dig the hole. And then maybe try to get out of it. What a plan!

I un-pause to continue the transcription and see that Barrett says that the "first thing" Scott Walker did was "he dug the hole even deeper." Oh? But Walker eliminated the deficit. He got us into a surplus. Barrett's idea is that the hole was dug deeper...

... because he had those corporate tax cuts, he had those tax cuts that benefited wealthy people, very, very, in a very good way — from their perspective. I don't think you solve the budget crisis by digging the hole deeper.

Still trying to get to the answer to how Barrett would deal with the budget, Gousha asks: So you would repeal those? Barrett's answer is stodgily cagey:

I'm going to look at those and see whether they are tied to job creation, 'cause for me — and I've seen this as mayor — I have people who come in or businesses that come in who want to have tax incentives, and my questions are always the same: How many jobs are we talking about and are they family-supporting jobs? So that, to me, is the tie.

That is, he doesn't want to generally lower tax rates to stimulate business. He wants particular businesses to come to him and ask for an individual incentive and convince him somehow that their business is the right kind of business, to work through him. He sees himself as a power broker, dealing in privilege. And, of course, in case you haven't noticed, he still hasn't expressed a single idea about how to deal with the budget. He adopted Walker's "hole" metaphor, ignored the fact that Walker filled the hole, told us the now-filled hole shouldn't be dug deeper, and keeps reverting to an urge to re-dig the hole!

Barrett shifts to complaining that Walker's tax cuts haven't produced jobs, and Gousha pulls him back to the unanswered question: "Don't you have to make some pretty deep cuts?" Barrett says:

Well, let's look at this, 'cause this is where the lost year comes into play. Obviously, we've had a year of ideological civil war....

But Scott Walker erased the deficit! How was that a lost year? Barrett is trying to plug in his "civil war" theme: He can end the strife. But the question is the deficit: Don't you have to make some pretty deep cuts? I'm not transcribing every word at this point, because it's completely nonresponsive. It's his canned material about not enough jobs — as if he could bring more — and ideological civil war — as if the Democrats weren't at least equally belligerent. Barrett does eventually get around to saying if only there were a lot more jobs, then the government could collect more income taxes and sales taxes and property taxes, and that money would help fill "the hole." So that's sort of an idea about what to do: First, get a whole lot of new jobs! That's Walker's idea too. Encourage business; grow the economy. But it's not Walker's only idea. Walker got rid of the deficit.

Everyone knows growing the economy would be great. The question is what would work to grow the economy? Why would we think Barrett would be better? Barrett says he would "focus" on growing the economy, whereas Walker has "traveled around the country giving these speeches." I think most of Walker's traveling had to do with the need to raise money to fight the recall, but even if Walker did simply seek stature within the national conservative movement, why would that have a deleterious effect on the growth of the Wisconsin economy? If you were deciding where to locate or expand a business, wouldn't you be positively influenced if Scott Walker's message reached you? By contrast, would you be encouraged to hear that Governor Tom Barrett was focusing?

Barrett would focus, he would set priorities, he would look and see, he would try to get out of the hole. With all this effort, all this thinking, all this observing and focusing.... why is there nothing specific at all? When I think of focus, I think of getting greater clarity and detail. Based on this interview, I don't see any capacity to focus. The closest thing to specificity I heard was Tom Barrett's desire to increase spending and increase taxes. No wonder he wanted to stay fuzzy.

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove told the FOX News Sunday audience that bringing up Rev. Jeremiah “G-D America” Wright this year is stupid. Rove said the issue was litigated four years ago by John McCain.
Really?

(Scott Johnson)

Byron York takes off from Edward Klein’s new book to report that Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been advised to exercise his right to remain silent until 2013, when his long-time congregant in the White House will have a little more — as Lucianne puts it — “ah, flexibility”:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose “God damn America” sermon set off a firestorm during the 2008 campaign, agreed not to publish an account of the episode until after President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, according to an interview Wright conducted with the author of a new book on Obama. Wright said he made the decision at the urging of a friend and mentor, the prominent University of Chicago emeritus professor Martin Marty.

In the interview, Wright told Ed Klein, author of “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House”, that he keeps a cardboard box of documents and notes detailing his experiences beginning in March 2008, when the controversy over his sermons began. “It’s a painful box to look at,” Wright said.

Marty is both a former Lutheran pastor and professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School. I guess we can count his advice to Wright a little bit more of the divine intervention that has proved of such great assistance to Obama. Until Rev. Wright can tell the story after the election, we’ll have to keep our thinking outside the box. Lucianne directs attention to fitting the musical commentary on the situation, words by lyricist Sheldon Harnick (“There is nothing unorthodox/About a little tin box…”).