Around and about...

Here's a collection of some interesting data-shards found on today's web.

Glenn Greenwald on Game Change, the new book on the 2008 race:

The book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness: Time's Mark Halperin. And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., "journalists") and hangers-on who populate our decadent little Versailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze.

The National Enquirer, Matt Drudge and Politico aren't aberrational extremes in our press corps. As Halperin and Harris correctly noted in calling Washington journalism "The Freak Show," they are at its epicenter, leading the way.

"Black Jesus": According the Game Change, that's how Obama campaign staffers referred to the object of their affections. Perhaps they were being ironic. If any anti-Obama writers had used the exact same term (ironically or otherwise), they would have been damned as racists.

Martha Coakley is the Democrat running for Ted Kennedy's seat in the Senate. She's in some trouble -- yes, a Democrat is in trouble in Massachusetts! -- and Obama won't campaign for her.

Why not? Perhaps because the president's approval ratings are down to 46 percent, according to CBS News. A Republican spinster told Politico's Ben Stein something that may be more than mere spin:

"When you consider the political demographics of Massachusetts, the reality is that this race should not even be close. The fact that it is however, reflects how damaged the Democrat brand has become among independents in recent months, even in a dark blue state like Massachusetts."

Fortunately, Coakley's chances are aided by a third contestant in this race, a libertarian independent named Joseph (no relation) Kennedy. He's likely to split the anti-Obama vote.

(I've just enough lingering partisanship left in me to add the word "fortunately" to the previous paragraph.)

The Liberal conspiracy strikes! The Tea Partiers are claiming that their web sites have been attacked by a conspiracy of Evil Liberals who have uploaded porn to their sites. Sounds dubious to me. Progs did a lot of obnoxious crap in 2008, but they never did anything like that. They preferred to engage in invective and conspiranoia. In all likelihood, any "porn-bombing" must have been the work of Viguerie's henchpeople, out to create solidarity within their fracturing movement by feigning an attack from the liberal bogeyman.

Incidentally, note that "liberal" is a term of opprobrium among the teabaggers. I am a liberal.

From time to time, readers try to hand me some yada-yada about how the tea party movement transcends the usual political and ideological boundaries. Oh please. Sell that crap to someone younger. Throughout 1993-96, the Clinton-crazed conspiratorialists (the Mena-mongers and the Vince Foster nutcases) insisted that they were non-partisan. We now know that that movement was stage-managed by Republicans.

Whenever these pseudo-"grass-roots" movements crop up, eventually we discover whose hand is working the puppet. The Obama presidency was born in a faux grass-roots movement, and now it is opposed by a faux grass-roots movement. Live faux; die faux: Such manipulations are the future of American politics.

Astonishingly, the people who fall in step with these movements always think that they are thinking for themselves.

Bob Somerby has a new site up: "How he got there." Near as I can tell, the purpose of the site is to publish in installments a book on the 2000 election. Somerby is the man for that job. Actually, it's a job he should have done seven years ago -- and the book should have been in bookstores.

Pay-off: Blue Lyon has done some good work. She notes that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber is the media's go-to guy for dubious defenses of the Obamacare bill, even though Gruber doesn't mention the nearly $300,000 he gets from the Department of Health and Human Services to "consult" on health care reform. BL compares this behavior to a couple of notorious precedents: 1. Bush paid a black pundit a quarter-mill to promote an education reform bill, and 2. The cable news channels offered "objective" views on the upcoming Iraq war from analysts paid by military contractors.

Same shit, different administration.

Finally: She's back again! The Virgin Mary, that is. Egypt has a by-now well-established tradition of non-subjective apparitions. They don't go in for those private parlays in patois with pretty Pyrenneean peasants. The current visitations are occurring over a church tower in the Cairo suburb of Al-Warrak.

In a previous post, we discussed the last appearance of such phenomena, in the city of Assiut. As I said then: "I think this is fake. But how was it done?"

Those words apply as well to this video. The "winking out" at the end may give some clue. Also see here and here and here. The inane commentary from the You-Tubers may convince you that humanity is beyond redemption.

Part of me wishes that we could classify these scenes as genuinely inexplicable, but something about the staging seems rather too Disneyland-ish.