Monday opinion: The Hurt Locker wins big.
NY Times TV Watch:
The hosts, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, did an updated Catskills routine, but were at their best when snubbing George Clooney and mocking the most distinguished nominees. "Oh look, there’s that damn Helen Mirren," Mr. Martin said, pointing at the audience. "That’s Dame Helen Mirren," Mr. Baldwin explained.
Best was pointing to a few young actors and then themselves: "this is you in 5 years."
Paul Krugman:
Everyone has a theory about the financial crisis. These theories range from the absurd to the plausible — from claims that liberal Democrats somehow forced banks to lend to the undeserving poor (even though Republicans controlled Congress) to the belief that exotic financial instruments fostered confusion and fraud. But what do we really know?
What do we know? Whatever happens, the banksters get their bonuses. That's what we know.
EJ Dionne:
In a city where the phrase "bipartisan initiative" is becoming an oxymoron, the urgency of containing the damage the Supreme Court could do to our electoral system creates an opportunity for a rare convergence of interest and principle.
In a city where Democrats offer olive branches, and Republican burn the branches for fuel, the parties are equally blamed, except by the public (they blame Republicans 2:1 for non-cooperation in the polls). But Republicans are the party that appointed the SCOTUS that screwed American voters in favor of corporate money.
Mark Penn offers health reform advice you didn't request, and won't be interested in after you read it.
Drew Westen:
To his credit, the president pushed through a stimulus bill that prevented us from falling off the cliff. But he refused, as FDR had done, to brand the crisis that had occurred as the direct result of Republican ideology and governance. He refused to explain to the American people why deficit spending in times of a crashing downward spiral is a virtue and not a vice. And he refused to call out -- let alone even answer -- Republican politicians attacking him from his first days of office for deficit spending, although they had just created as much debt in 8 years as in the previous 200-plus with enormous tax breaks for the wealthy and a trillion dollar war "off the books," neither of which they even considered paying for. As a result, he got little credit for having prevented another Great Depression, and now there are two competing narratives, that the stimulus saved us and that it was a waste of taxpayers' money.
FDR didn't contend with political foes with their own cable network and credulous he said, she said stenographers.
Joan Walsh:
I predicted Wednesday that Republicans and the mainstream media would soon have a new but typically simplistic partisan line: that recent scandals involving Democratic Reps. Eric Massa and Charlie Rangel and New York Gov. David Paterson would make 2010 what 2006 was for Republicans -- the year voters punished the party for its corruption. Throw in oldies but goodies like former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, both Democrats, and I foresaw an avalanche of 2006-2010 comparisons. And I was right.
Before I attack that false equivalence, let me make clear: I'm not defending these Democrats.
Just setting the record straight.