brainrow

The Daily Show opens Panderer’s Box (strong language):

The Daily Show goes to the Pollies — the Oscars of political advertising.

John Oliver: A candidate like Barack Obama has a hopeful glow about him. How would you extinguish that?

Ben Chao: It’s pretty simple. The first thing you would have to do is to undercut people’s ability to truly hope for his vision. So, if you undercut the vision of Barack Obama, you take away hope.

Stephen Colbert says McCain and Clinton’s “gas tax holiday” doesn’t go far enough.

I’m sure you’re asking, folks, how will we pay for unlimited free gas? Well, the answer is simple: I don’t care. Besides, have you forgotten about a little thing called our grandkids? Because they are very generous, even though they don’t know it yet.

Imagine, if you will, that it is January 20, 2001. Inauguration Day. George W. Bush is beginning eight years in the White House.

Now, imagine that you have a pair of magic binoculars, that let you look into the future. While Bush is taking the oath of office, you sneak a quick peek, and what you see is this Newsweek cover:

In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, “they” have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

Okay, now imagine that it’s January 20, 2009, and that John McCain is being sworn in as president. Once again, you’ve got the magic binoculars. Do you really want to look into the future and see what America will look like after another four or eight years of Bush policies?

Amazingly, we still have power to change that view of the future.

Via Coyote Gulch, here’s a quick rundown of the entire Democratic race so far:

It’s nice to have an election about substance, huh?

Via Atrios, Bloomberg reports on one modern looting technique:

Bank of America Corp., the second-biggest U.S. bank, said it may not guarantee $38.1 billion of Countrywide Financial Corp.’s debt after taking over the mortgage lender, increasing the likelihood of a default.

“There is no assurance that any such debt would be redeemed, assumed or guaranteed,” the bank said in an April 30 regulatory filing, adding that no decision has been reached. Investors had grown more optimistic the bank would back Countrywide debt. Ratings firm Standard & Poor’s cut the mortgage-lender’s debt to junk today after saying it would raise the grade earlier this week.

…

“This confirms how tenuous this transaction is,” said Christopher Whalen, managing director at Institutional Risk Analytics, a banking research firm in Torrance, California.

Whalen expects Bank of America to absorb the best assets, including Countrywide Bank, while the debt remains with a new company created by the merger, Red Oak Merger Corp. Red Oak may then file for bankruptcy, shielding Bank of America from liability, Whalen said.

So bankruptcy law allows this? You can strip out the assets and isolate the debts in a shell company before declaring bankruptcy for the shell company?

If this is legal, we need some new laws.

History is closer than you think:

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, has died. He was 90.

The German military said in a statement Friday that the former army major died Thursday night. It did not give a cause of death.

Von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers. Hitler escaped harm when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the bomb’s explosive force.

Almost immediately afterward, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings that saw some hanged by the neck with piano wire.

Though many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the hopes they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager’s name was never divulged and he was never found out.

History trivia: twenty-five years to the day after the Hitler assassination attempt, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The Saturn V rocket that started them on their way was designed by a team led by Wernher von Braun, who had formerly designed rockets for the Nazi war effort. Small world.

I don’t know whether I’ve heard someone else say this before, or whether it just seems familiar because it’s one of those things that’s so obvious once somebody says it. Atrios on George W. Bush:

Watching Bush speak you realize he’s a really dumb person who thinks everyone in the room is even dumber than he is.

This is why he slows down on the three-syllable words, and why, as The Daily Show noted in 2006, he spends so much time explaining what his job is.

I believe I should thank Adam Chodikoff for that.

Some people are hard to please. From the New York Times:

Exxon Mobil reported the second-best quarterly profit in its history on Thursday — and investors could barely hide their disappointment.

Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, said its net income rose 17 percent in the first quarter, buoyed by high oil prices. But that was less than Wall Street expected, and Exxon’s shares fell 3.6 percent, to close at $89.70.

The Internet cartoon Joy of Tech thinks the problem is that we’ve passed Peak Profit. (Click the link or the cartoon to see the whole thing.)

It’s all downhill from here.

In my younger days, I was a huge fan of Marvel comic books.

I enjoyed the first two Spider-Man movies. I cringed through both Fantastic Four movies. I’m eager to see Iron Man when it comes out on DVD — probably around Thanksgiving time.

I didn’t know what to make of Ang Lee’s Hulk movie. Frankly, it left me baffled. I didn’t enjoy it, but I thought maybe I could see it five years later and say, “Are you kidding? It’s brilliant!”

Now, five years later, it looks like they’re trying again. Universal is promoting another Hulk movie, scheduled to open June 13th.

Unfortunately, the computer-graphics Hulk still looks like a character from a video game.

Who knows? Maybe in another five years…

Lots of young people say they get their news from The Daily Show.

It’s a parody of a news broadcast, shown on the cable TV channel Comedy Central. Unlike the broadcast networks or the cable news channels, The Daily Show doesn’t have actual reporters tracking down sources and digging up stories. But it has something that “real” news operations often seem to be lacking: a long-term memory.

The Washington Post profiles the man behind the memory, 37-year-old researcher Adam Chodikoff:

At its best, Chodikoff’s work goes beyond satire and into the realm of cold truth-telling. The show has particularly made doublespeak about the Iraq war a continuing theme in a running segment called “Mess O’Potamia.” After Vice President Cheney told ABC News last month that “you can’t be blown off course” by negative opinion polls about the war, Chodikoff found the perfect counterpoint: Cheney, in a clip from December 2005, justifying the White House’s Iraq policy by citing . . . an opinion poll.

“He has this amazing memory for sound bites about anything political or about policy,” says David Javerbaum, executive producer of “The Daily Show.” “What’s remarkable is how many ideas he initiates because he remembered that this guy said this or that a year ago.” While Stewart and the show’s deadpan “correspondents” usually get the laughs, Javerbaum says Chodikoff is the program’s “unsung hero.”

Chodikoff turns up plenty for TV’s talking heads to be embarrassed about, too. A two-part segment about Fox News Channel this month included a devastating mash-up of Fox pundits Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity making obviously contradictory statements. Chodikoff did the same number last week on “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, catching Russert pooh-poohing Hillary Clinton’s expected victory in the Pennsylvania primary on the “Today” show on Sunday, then pronouncing it “a pretty big deal” three days later on MSNBC.

He reads eight newspapers and scans transcripts from broadcast and cable news.

He often finds that the most intriguing factoids turn up in the 23rd paragraph of an article. A few weeks ago, he noticed a line deep in a wire story: that Bush was speaking to the same group of religious broadcasters at the same hotel on the run-up to the fifth anniversary of the war last month as he did on the run-up to the war’s start. Turns out, too, that Bush advanced the same rationale for the war both times — making the side-by-side footage of the two speeches a finely ironic piece for the show.

…

As for the blogosphere and its rich stew of opinion and invective, Chodikoff will have none of it. “I’ll defend the mainstream media,” he says. “I trust [information] that has been edited and fact-checked.” Without a factual foundation, he adds, the show’s jokes “have no meaning.”

What? My opinion isn’t worth as much as actual facts? Clearly, this is a man mired deep in the reality-based community.

The Daily Show isn’t really a news show, but it may provide the best news analysis on television, and that’s no joke. Shame on the other shows that pretend to provide news analysis. Thank you, Adam, for helping to fill the gap.