Thing I don't need to comment on

So now there's a sting on NPR, supposedly the director hates conservative tea parties (and loves Madeira). This is shocking... ? I don't tend to listen to NPR much for news (BBC seems more objective), but it also covers a ton of stuff that you don't get anywhere else in the major outlets (particularly Faux). If you are listening to it for actual news, you can kind of tell there's a slant, but it's not anywhere near the Faux slant, which is like a canyon straight down into conservative-ville. It's not a "super-ultra-mega-liberal" slant the way Faux operates for right-wingers because you don't get something like a Nader/Kucinich-ville vision of things.

What was more amusing was the take down of Peter King.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Radical Muslim Hearings
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Radical Muslim Hearings - IRA Terrorism
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Reza Aslan's comment that he "heard Peter King is a dick" was also appropriate. The guy is clearly a bigoted moron posing as a national security expert. There is an issue with Islamic radicals, clearly. But the security theater he's engaging in doesn't help us at all. Continuing to disparage loyal American citizens even as they cooperate with the FBI to work against terrorist and other violent threats, while completely discounting the possibility of terrorist activity conducted by non-Muslims (around the world, like the IRA or Tamil Tigers or terrorism by other domestic sources), yes, you are a moron. Thanks for playing, sir.

Oliver's closing statement of "that whole fucking forest is accountable and must be felled" seems to be how we're playing this one.

Speaking of conservative-tea partiers, Rand Paul actually did reasonably well versus Stewart the other day too. He struck me as less populist than Stewart for instance (not terribly surprising). Though I disagree with his Austrian-ism on the central bank explanation for the housing collapse, he at least articulates the problems of regulatory capture and other libertarian critiques of government interference in the economy pretty well. I certainly agree that letting the banks fail would have been fine, but I think injecting some QE at the time would have eased the process of demolishing the dumber banks (like AIG). My critique isn't so much central banking, there were many other regulations and problems with the banking system in this country that can be examined and shown to play large roles in distorting the housing market and causing a financial collapse.