The American Spectator

New York Times

Bug-eyed and sputtering, professor Paul Krugman avers another implausible explanation as to why the Liberals were trounced in the recent election and sent unceremoniously to history’s necropolis, there to reside with the Nudists and the Prohibitionists:

Have you heard the one about how there’s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators? Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional “regulators” work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.

Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda, as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left, which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)

(December 24, 2010)

Newsweek

In the exciting new Newsweek, Miss Lorraine Ali interviews Will.i.am, formerly Mr. William James Adams Jr., sometime after surgeons removed his brain, and elicits some surprisingly energetic patterns of thought before he was led away by his pet parrot, Wonderful:

You’ve also produced for a lot of icons. How do you tell someone like Bono he’s out of tune?

“I panic before I go in the studio, like ‘Oh, God, I’m about to be chillin’ with M.J. for a week in Ireland,’ So you geek out on your way there, but as soon as you get there you have to be responsible. You also have to humble yourself and not get all extra cocky, like ‘Yeah, you want my expertise ‘n’ s—t?’ Well, that s—t’s wack. You can’t ego out.’”

(Dec. 27, 2010/Jan. 3, 2011)

Politics Daily

Driven by the horrible fears of the present Liberal moment, and by the attendant frostbite afflicting even sunny Washington, D.C., David Corn, once again, attacks the wholesome aesthetic relaxations of the American people:

Here’s a bet that I probably won’t be able to collect: I wager that in 50 years, historians gazing back at now [sic] will pay less attention to the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, or even the economic downturn. They will wonder why present and past administrations did not sufficiently respond to the threat of human-induced climate change. If the scientific consensus is on the mark, the planet is likely to heat up by several degrees in the next half-century, and this will cause all sorts of severe consequences: droughts and other extreme weather, disease, species extinction, water shortages for tens of millions of people, rising sea levels, and more-which could cause conflict and dislocations around the globe.

Yet this long-term (but quickly approaching) problem-which at some point might no longer be redressable-has become largely a ho-hum matter. Look at the tepid response to (and the tepid action of) the recent U.N. climate summit that concluded a few days ago in Cancun. Far more many people can tell you what happened with Bristol Palin on “Dancing with the Stars” than what transpired in the conference centers of Cancun.

(December 12, 2010)