Word of “Up w/Chris Hayes” has spread beyond a few hundred punk fans. In less than a year on television (and with a chirpy voice, a weakness for gesticulation and a tendency to drop honors-thesis words like “signifier” into casual conversation), Mr. Hayes has established himself as Generation Y’s wonk prince of the morning political talk-show circuit.

But even with his grad-student sensibility and a program that resembles a dorm-room bull session, Mr. Hayes has attracted a cult following, particularly among frustrated hyper-educated members of the Occupy Wall Street generation who are seemingly fed up with the partisan bickering that prevails in Washington and passes as political discourse on the airwaves.

“He is never doctrinaire,” Mr. Leo said in an interview. Both punk fans and “Up” fans are “suspicious of any authority,” he said, and appreciate that Mr. Hayes “is always willing to challenge his own assumptions, and the received wisdom on both sides of the aisle.”

Like Deadheads or Trekkies, fans of the program cluster under a common nickname: Uppers.

Credit for the nickname goes to Wyeth Ruthven, a public relations consultant in Washington, who coined the #uppers Twitter hashtag as a joke about the program’s early broadcast time last October, a couple of weeks after it began. The term quickly went viral after Mr. Hayes (who monitors his Twitter feed on a MacBook Pro beside him as cameras roll, and often invokes viewer tweets on air) retweeted Mr. Ruthven. Within weeks, hundreds were joining the spirited #uppers debates on issues like gay marriage and industrial farming. Viewers now post more than 6,000 comments every weekend.

Social media, in fact, have played an unusually important role in driving traffic to the program, an MSNBC spokeswoman said. About 45 percent of the visitors to the program’s Web site, which contains complete episodes, linked through sites like Facebook and Twitter. In April, those users spent an average of 51 minutes on the site each visit.

But Twitter is still the hotbed of “Up” fandom. Even so, the program’s feed is not just an online clubhouse for New York media types like Lizz Winstead, a creator of “The Daily Show,” and members of Le Tigre, the too-cool electro-pop band. Cher and Chad Ochocinco have chimed in, too.

Whatever their political leanings, fans are responding out of frustration with the status quo, said Jim Rosenberg, a recruiting consultant in Greensboro, N.C., and frequent tweeter. “It’s the pent-up demand for voices other than the well-rehearsed and seasoned insider professionals who have dominated television delivering practiced meaninglessness for years,” he said.

“Up” comes off as a rebuke to traditional cable shout-fests like CNN’s late “Crossfire.” Thanks to its early weekend time slot, the program has the freedom to unwind over two hours each Saturday and Sunday. Guests are encouraged to go deep into the issues of the week, and not try to score cheap-shot points to win the debate

Labels: Chris Hayes, David Brooks, hack journalism, New York Times

After all Romney really is the perfect Brooksian Candidate: hollow, reprogrammable and rich. Where John McCain was willing to grit his teeth and bellycrawl to kiss Jerry Falwell's ass, the humanlike simulacrum named "Mitt" gives every indication that, if required to complete his Prime Directive, he would cheerfully disinter Falwell's mortal remains, dress them up in Nancy Reagan's 1981 inaugural ball gown and dance a tarantella with it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the Fourth of July.

Labels: bloggers, David Brooks, hack journalism

The U.S. now seems to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, which is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. This cleaner, cheaper energy source is already replacing dirtier coal-fired plants. It could serve as the ideal bridge, Amy Jaffe of Rice University says, until renewable sources like wind and solar mature.

Already shale gas has produced more than half a million new jobs, not only in traditional areas like Texas but also in economically wounded places like western Pennsylvania and, soon, Ohio. If current trends continue, there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs to come.

Chemical companies rely heavily on natural gas, and the abundance of this new source has induced companies like Dow Chemical to invest in the U.S. rather than abroad. The French company Vallourec is building a $650 million plant in Youngstown, Ohio, to make steel tubes for the wells. States like Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York will reap billions in additional revenue. Consumers also benefit. Today, natural gas prices are less than half of what they were three years ago, lowering electricity prices. Meanwhile, America is less reliant on foreign suppliers.

All of this is tremendously good news, but, of course, nothing is that simple. The U.S. is polarized between “drill, baby, drill” conservatives, who seem suspicious of most regulation, and some environmentalists, who seem to regard fossil fuels as morally corrupt and imagine we can switch to wind and solar overnight.

The shale gas revolution challenges the coal industry, renders new nuclear plants uneconomic and changes the economics for the renewable energy companies, which are now much further from viability. So forces have gathered against shale gas, with predictable results.

The clashes between the industry and the environmentalists are now becoming brutal and totalistic, dehumanizing each side. Not-in-my-backyard activists are organizing to prevent exploration. Environmentalists and their publicists wax apocalyptic.

Like every energy source, fracking has its dangers. The process involves injecting large amounts of water and chemicals deep underground. If done right, this should not contaminate freshwater supplies, but rogue companies have screwed up and there have been instances of contamination.

The wells, which are sometimes beneath residential areas, are serviced by big trucks that damage the roads and alter the atmosphere in neighborhoods. A few sloppy companies could discredit the whole sector.

These problems are real, but not insurmountable. An exhaustive study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded, “With 20,000 shale wells drilled in the last 10 years, the environmental record of shale-gas development is for the most part a good one.” In other words, the inherent risks can be managed if there is a reasonable regulatory regime, and if the general public has a balanced and realistic sense of the costs and benefits.

Two small earthquakes near Blackpool in northwest England earlier this year were probably caused by hydraulic fracturing, a technique of grinding underground rocks to extract natural gas.

It’s “highly probable” that fracking, as the process is known, at the Preese Hall-1 site caused the quakes, U.K.-based shale explorer Cuadrilla Resources Ltd. said in a report published today. The geological circumstances were “rare” and the strongest possible tremor, of a magnitude of 3, wouldn’t be a risk to safety or property on the surface, it said.

Labels: American Idiots, David Brooks, fracking, hack journalism

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day, David Brooks, Greedy Republican Bastards, Occupy Wall Street, The Republican War on Women, wingnuttia

All that is left now is for Chuck Todd and David Gregory to explain how this is a failure on the part of Obama. And no, I am not watching the damned debate tonight.

Labels: beer, bloggers, Chuck Todd, David Brooks, David Gregory, hack journalism, irrelevant has-been pundits

What happens when there is no money to give to the people who have no money? That is the moral question. It's fine to say that the old people should have saved more, they should have worked an extra job, they should have done without cable TV, they should have invested more wisely. Saying that doesn't change the fact that there will be old people who do not have money. These old people will believe that they need food and shelter and medical care.

Will they get it? At the arch-plutocrats' end of things, the Koch brothers' end, the end occupied by the most devout worshippers of Ayn Rand, the answer is: no. That's the goal. It's long since time for the sloppy, implicit, badly supported social contract to go away. Rich people have been trimming their contribution to the general revenue for decades now. They are not interested in paying the premium that keeps old people and ailing people or just backward people out of the streets. If the day comes that they have to travel to and from their various compounds in armored helicopters, they can afford the helicopters. It's not their problem.

David Brooks do not believe they are that kind of person. David Brooks are responsible. David Brooks care about the need to "invest" in "effectiveness" for all.

Alas, living is not effective. Employers have stopped paying people for their post-productive years. They have done this, welfare-capitalistically, with the sense that the cost and responsibility they are shedding will be picked up by...someone, somewhere.

Labels: Big Blue Smurf Blogging, David Brooks, economic death watch, heartlessness, scumbaggery

I grew up wanting to be a humorist.

Labels: American Idiots, David Brooks

Jesus Christ, some people just don't get it..
Oh My God!! Nancy Pelosi is coming to the Net Roots National Convention!! Piss my fucking pants and eleventy eleven, Whoo Hoo!
Bonus, Harry Fucking Reid is too!!

Oh My Fucking God, where is my Sharpie..

[snip]

Oh, we don't have enough votes, the Republicans are going to Fillibuster, yadda fucking yadda.

You pussy mother fucker. Ram your fucking agenda down their fucking throats and if they want to fillibuster, make damn sure they have a few cots and some fucking hot tea.

Now ya have some crazy fucking bitch taking you on and you can't even handle that shit.

[snip]

If that crazy bitch Angle whips yer ass in the Primary, it will go a long way to rehabilitate the Electoral process..
Just think, Michelle Bachmann won't be the craziest fucking moron in Congress any more and you and old Bitch McConnell can have a nice honeymoon. After ya just fucked over the millions of folks who were counting on some fucking unenjoyment, gave billions to the cunt fucking bastards in the banking industry and let BP get away with killing three fucking states and a few hundred thousand former tax payers, it's time for you to retire. Take Joe Fucking Lieberman with ya.

Labels: bloggers, David Brooks, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, real chickens

Labels: David Brooks, hack journalism, idiocy, Teh Stoopid

...there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

[snip]

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Labels: American Idiots, David Brooks, terrorism

They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.

Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence.

But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

Baghdad's top government security official has announced the arrest of close to a dozen officers and around 50 members of Iraq's security forces for alleged involvement or negligence in Sunday's suicide bombings in the Iraqi capital.

Iraqi TV reported that Major General Qasim Atta, acting as a military spokesman for the Iraqi capital, announced the arrests of 11 officers and 50 members of the military and police for alleged responsibility or negligence in Sunday's attacks in Baghdad.

About 155 people were killed and hundreds of others wounded in the massive explosions that rocked the Iraqi capital, gutting two government ministries and blowing out windows across the entire center of the city.

The explosions, which killed dozens of children near the government-controlled Green Zone, provoked widespread outrage. Several opposition members of parliament called on top ministers to resign and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to testify to parliament about security lapses.

General Atta, who had spoken only recently of the improving security situation in Iraq, announced the crackdown to journalists. He said that both the military commander and the police chief of Baghdad's Salhiya district, site of Sunday's explosions, were under arrest, pending investigation.

Labels: Afghanistan, closet cases, clusterfuck, David Brooks, hack journalism

Barack Obama has decided upon a vice-presidential running mate. And while I don’t know who it is as I write, for the good of the country, I hope he picked Joe Biden.

Biden’s weaknesses are on the surface. He has said a number of idiotic things over the years and, in the days following his selection, those snippets would be aired again and again.

But that won’t hurt all that much because voters are smart enough to forgive the genuine flaws of genuine people. And over the long haul, Biden provides what Obama needs:

Labels: David Brooks, Joe Biden, Wake Me Up When It's Over

As in other recent campaigns, lawyers account for the biggest chunk of Democratic donations. They have donated about $18 million to Obama, compared with about $5 million to John McCain, according to data released on June 2 and available at OpenSecrets.org.

People who work at securities and investment companies have given Obama about $8 million, compared with $4.5 for McCain. People who work in communications and electronics have given Obama about $10 million, compared with $2 million for McCain. Professors and other people who work in education have given Obama roughly $7 million, compared with $700,000 for McCain.

Real estate professionals have given Obama $5 million, compared with $4 million for McCain. Medical professionals have given Obama $7 million, compared with $3 million for McCain. Commercial bankers have given Obama $1.6 million, compared with $1.2 million for McCain. Hedge fund and private equity managers have given Obama about $1.6 million, compared with $850,000 for McCain.

When you break it out by individual companies, you find that employees of Goldman Sachs gave more to Obama than workers of any other employer. The Goldman Sachs geniuses are followed by employees of the University of California, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Harvard and Google. At many of these workplaces, Obama has a three- or four-to-one fund-raising advantage over McCain.

The trends are pretty clear: rising economic sectors tend to favor Democrats while declining economic sectors are more likely to favor Republicans. The Democratic Party (not just Obama) has huge fund-raising advantages among people who work in electronics, communications, law and the catchall category of finance, insurance and real estate. Republicans have the advantage in agribusiness, oil and gas and transportation. Which set of sectors do you think are going to grow most quickly in this century’s service economy?

If the Democrats are elected, this highly educated class will have much more say over policy than during the campaign. Undecided voters sway campaigns, but in government, elites generally run things. Once the Republicans are vanquished, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that capital gains tax hike or serious measures to expand unionization.

Over the past few years, people from Goldman Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the federal government. Over the next few they might just take over the whole darn thing.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, David Brooks, idiocy

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment.

Obama also made a pair of grand and cynical promises that are the sign of someone who is thinking more about campaigning than governing.

Labels: Barack Obama, David Brooks, hack journalism

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

[snip]

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

[snip]

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.

But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988). Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

[snip]

...spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.

Labels: Bob Herbert, civil rights, David Brooks

So the real Heart and Soul of the Democratic Party is not bloggers, but those "high school educated women in the Midwest" whom Brooks condescendingly idealizes. And there is, of course, no overlap between those two groups. Bloggers are rabid elitists freaks from the coasts, while "high school educated women in the Midwest" are the saintly salt of the American earth who don't know what blogs are.

And how do we learn what the true political beliefs are of the all-important "high school educated women in the Midwest"? Do we consult polls or the outcome of elections? No, there is no need for any of that. We can just ask David Brooks, because he profoundly understands them, and they always think as he does. Like David Broder and the rest of the Beltway class, David Brooks speaks for Them. Thus, Democrats can only win elections if they adopt the views of David Brooks, because those are the views which are adored in the Heartland.

Labels: bloggers, David Brooks

Labels: David Brooks, idiocy, jingoism, mad dogs

Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored. While some in his administration may be looking for exit strategies, he is unshakably committed to stabilizing Iraq. If Gen. David Petraeus comes back and says he needs more troops and more time, Bush will scrounge up the troops. If GeneralPetraeus says he can get by with fewer, Bush will support that, too.

Bush said he will get General Petraeus’s views unfiltered by the Pentagon establishment. He feels no need to compromise to head off opposition from Capitol Hill and is confident that he can rebuild popular support. “I have the tools,” he said.

I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency.

All this will be taken as evidence by many that Bush is delusional. He’s living in a cocoon. He doesn’t see or can’t face how badly the war is going and how awfully he has performed.

But Bush is not blind to the realities in Iraq. After all, he lives through the events we’re not supposed to report on: the trips to Walter Reed, the hours and hours spent weeping with or being rebuffed by the families of the dead.

Rather, his self-confidence survives because it flows from two sources. The first is his unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea. Bush is convinced that history is moving in the direction of democracy, or as he said Friday: “It’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.”

Second, Bush remains energized by the power of the presidency. Some presidents complain about the limits of the office. But Bush, despite all the setbacks, retains a capacious view of the job and its possibilities.

Labels: David Brooks, hack journalism, idiocy

What Thompson’s campaign represents, then, is a return to basics. It’s not primarily engaged in the issues that have dominated recent G.O.P. politics. Thompson is campaigning to restore America’s constitutional soul. He’s going back to Madison and Jefferson and the decentralized federalism of the founders, at least as channeled through Goldwater. As Thompson himself said while running for Senate, “America’s government is bringing America down, and the only thing that can change that is a return to the basics.”

Thompson thus becomes one pole in the debate now roiling the G.O.P. Nobody is running as the continuation of Bush. The big question now is: should the party go back to the basics or should it jump forward and transform itself into something new? Thompson articulates the back-to-basics view in its purest form. Newt Gingrich articulates the transformational view in its purest form. The other candidates are a mishmash in between.

If I were a political consultant I would tell my candidate to play up Thompson’s back-to-basics theme. This is a traumatized party, not in the mood for anything risky and new. But over the long run, back to basics is no solution because it doesn’t produce a positive agenda for today’s problems.

Fred Thompson’s political skills are as good as anybody now running, but his challenge is going to be building a concrete agenda on his anti-Washington message. It will be translating his Goldwater risorgimento philosophy into policies on energy, health care reform, Islamic extremism and education. For if there is one thing the last 30 years have taught us, it is that campaigns that are strictly anti-Washington do not command 50 percent of the vote because they don’t address the decentralized global challenges that now face us.

Perhaps, as my friend Daniel Casse notes, what the G.O.P. needs is Newt Gingrich’s brain lodged in Fred Thompson’s temperament.

Labels: David Brooks, Fred Thompson, idiocy

But, hey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.

He writes that “the idea of self-government became feasible after the printing press.” With this machine, people suddenly had the ability to use the printed word to debate ideas and proceed logically to democratic conclusions. As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This Age of Reason produced the American Revolution. But in the 20th century, television threatened it all. In Gore’s view, TV immobilizes the reasoning centers in the brain and stimulates the primitive, instinctive parts. TV creates a “visceral vividness” that is not “modulated by logic, reason and reflective thought.”

TV allows political demagogues to exaggerate dangers and stoke up fear. Furthermore, “conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the mind of the citizenry” and “the result is a de facto coup d’état overthrowing the rule of reason.”

Labels: David Brooks, idiocy