The Village

What He Just Said: The Brilliant Bob Somerby on the Madness of Maureen Dowd

Al Gore, Beltway Journalism, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, DARPANET, Duke Zeiberts, Frank Rich, Keith Olbermann, Love Story, Mario Cuomo, Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Rachel Maddow, The Village

March 30, 2009 9:46 est.

BS was the second guy I ever read on the tubes…-JT

Feel free to focus for five…you little freaks…

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STILL DUMBING US DOWN! A former sports guy—and a former Rhodes Scholar—continue to dumb liberals down: // link // print // previous // next //

MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009

Since we asked: On Friday, we asked a question (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/27/09): Now that the Washington Post had semi-corrected its bungled report about the weakling Obama Admin, would Rachel Maddow follow suit? Last Tuesday night, Maddow’s report had been even more wrong than the Post’s efforts had been.

Did Maddow correct? We’d have to say no. She did devote a lengthy segment to the topic in question—a segment we thought was quite remarkable for the ways it seemed to pretend that Maddow was brilliantly right all along. To see Friday’s segment, just click here (it runs more than seven minutes). We’ll discuss this topic later this week.

By the way, do you want to see Maddow’s original segment? It seems to have disappeared.

The emperor’s favorite columnist: Sadly for you and your whole family, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” may be Hans Christian Andersen’s most contemporary fable. Quite frequently, people simply can’t see lunacy, even as it stands before them—if the lunacy in question involves a famous authority figure.

We thought of Andersen when we read Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column. Dowd is the most famous columnist at our most influential newspaper—and she’s been visibly crazy for years.

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The Fake "Congressional Budget Office Report" Now Fully Assimilated Into Boner Village

Boner, CBO, Congressional Budget Office, GOP, John Boehner, Partisan Politics Prevail, Republicans, The Village

Such a Boehner

Bush Economic Issues

Of course it doesn’t matter that the report simply didn’t say what George Stephanopoulos, David Brooks and the rest of the Villagers Said it did.

The figure they cited wasn’t just out of context and just plain old misleading- it was wrong.

In fact, as the initial AP report noted, the CBO analysis did not take into account all aspects of the recovery plan — while it found that “only $26 billion out of $274 billion in infrastructure spending would be delivered into the economy by the Sept. 30 end of the budget year,” it did not “cover tax cuts or efforts by Democrats to provide relief to cash-strapped state governments to help with their Medicaid bills,” among other provisions. Nonetheless, in echoing aspects of the AP’s original report about the CBO analysis, numerous media figures and outlets left out the fact, reported by the AP, that CBO analyzed only part of the bill.

As the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported in a January 23 article: “[T]he nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.” The article continued: “Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.”

And it looks like Good Ol’ Ed Henry has taken one for the team in his first Official Reacharound for The Village:

Media Matters:

On the January 23 edition of CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, White House correspondent Ed Henry referred to a “study” from the Congressional Budget Office that Henry claimed “showed” that Obama’s economic stimulus package “may not really stimulate the economy.” Henry later asserted that the study “was suggesting that a lot of the spending proposals in the original plan would not really take effect for a couple of years, so it wouldn’t clearly help create jobs in the first two years of the president’s administration.”

David Brock and the writers and researchers at Media Matters For America have all the details