Archive for January 22nd, 2010

Conan gets $32 million … where’s the outrage? or the pay czar?

January 22, 2010

Punch line: Conan fails at 11:30 and gets $32 million to go away.  Where’s the pay czar when you need him ? 

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FBN: Conan, $40 Million & The TARP Takers by Brian Sullivan, January 19, 2010

Where’s the outrage?

Polls show the public is furious over the expected record bonuses being paid to wall streeters this year.   

Meantime, another large-font headline these days is the very public battle between Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and NBC.   After trading public barbs (advantage: Conan) for a few weeks, that fight appears over.   Leno gets his show back and Mr. O’Brien reportedly gets $40 million to walk away.

Good for him.   But where’s the bonus bruhaha?

NBC is owned (until the Comcast deal closes) by General Electric.  Like many big banks, GE benefited from taxpayer handouts through backstops of debt for its GE Capital divison.   Not once, but a couple of times.  Imagine the headlines if a stock trader at a TARP-taking bank was paid anywhere close to that to walk away.   The AFL-CIO would issue a press release, Congress would hold another hearing and many TV news types would trip over themselves to out-populist each other.

If we’re going to browbeat the traders for getting their contractually-mandated percentage of business (which is what most of the bonuses are), then we must also be fair and hand out the same criticism for other TARP-takers with large payouts, regardless of the business they’re in.    We don’t have to like the bonuses.   We don’t have to like the banks or the bailouts.   We shouldn’t.   But we should at least follow the money.

Full article:
http://briansullivan.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/01/19/conan-40-million-the-tarp-takers/

Posted in Financial Services & Crises | 1 Comment »

Nuts and Creeps … both endangered species

January 22, 2010

Punch line: tax payers are no longer going to tolerate lying, cheating, secret-dealing, ineffective government operatives.

Nelson’s Cornhusker Kickback was a defining moment — even the people of Nebraska — the beneficiaries of the special deal — rejected it as just plain wrong.

Imagine … a constituency that can’t be bought off.

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WSJ: The New Political Rumbling Massachusetts may signal an end to old ways of fighting , Peggy Noonan, Jan. 21, 2010

In the 2006 and 2008 elections, and at some point during the past decade, the ancestral war between Democrats and the Republicans began to take on a new look.

If you were a normal human sitting at home … chances are pretty good you came to see the two major parties not as the Dems versus the Reps, or the blue versus the bed, but as the Nuts versus the Creeps.

The Nuts were for high spending and taxing and the expansion of government no matter what. The Creeps were hypocrites who talked one thing and did another, who went along on the spending spree while lecturing on fiscal solvency.

In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort.

In 2009 and 2010, they looked at Obama’s general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations — health care, cap and trade — and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, “Uh-oh, he’s a Nut!”

Which meant they were left with the Creeps.

The contest between the Nuts and the Creeps may be ending.

The Nuts just got handed three big losses, and will have to have a meeting in Washington to discuss whether they’ve gotten too nutty.

But the Creeps have kind of had their meetings — in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts. And what seems to be emerging from that is a new and nonsnarling Republicanism.

We’ll see …

Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703699204575017503811443526.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Posted in Politics - General | 1 Comment »

FOX soars … Air America crashes.

January 22, 2010

Punch line: Everything has been coming up roses for Fox since the White House declared war on the network last year.

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RCP: Media Wars: FNC Keeps Rising, Air America Crashes, January 21, 2010

On Tuesday, liberal Air America radio declared bankruptcy and will cease live broadcasts immediately.

On the same day Neilsen reported competition-dwarfing numbers for Fox News’s coverage of the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday night. 

According to Neilsen, Fox News drew an 6.2 million total viewers during primetime Tuesday night, compared to only 1.5 million for CNN and 1.1 million for MSNBC.

Clearly, those numbers are driven in part by the fact that Fox’s right-leaning audience was intensely interested in the outcome of this race. But it also had to do with the fact that Fox simply provided more, and better, coverage of the event. Fox was the only network to cover Coakley and Brown’s speeches in their entirety.

And as  Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin noted “MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, positively enraged that Massachusetts dared to elect a Republican, delivered two hours of nonstop bilious rage toward the state’s voters, calling them “irrational” and “teabaggers,” engaged in “a total divorce from reality, and hinting that they’re vicious racists to boot.”  Good thing nobody was listening.

Full article:
http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/2010/01/21/media-wars-fnc-keeps-rising-air-america-crashes/

Posted in Media, Media - Ratings | Leave a Comment »