Colbert Roasts Bush

In case you missed Stephen Colbert’s brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, you can view it here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
It’s one thing to take on someone in a TV show. But to ridicule the press and the President of the United States in their face takes “muchos huevos grandes.”
Billmon:

Colbert’s routine was designed to draw blood — as good political satire should. It seemed obvious, at least to me, that he didn’t just despise his audience, he hated it. While that hardly merits comment here in Left Blogostan, White House elites clearly aren’t used to having such contempt thrown in their faces at one of their most cherished self-congratulatory events. So it’s no surprise the scribes have tried hard to expunge it from the semi-official record — as Peter Daou notes over at the Huffington Post.
Colbert used satire the way it’s used in more openly authoritarian societies: as a political weapon, a device for raising issues that can’t be addressed directly. He dragged out all the unmentionables — the Iraq lies, the secret prisons, the illegal spying, the neutered stupidity of the lapdog press — and made it pretty clear that he wasn’t really laughing at them, much less with them. It may have been comedy, but it also sounded like a bill of indictment, and everybody understood the charges.

And there was a lot of charges that short routine.

National Anthem

I don’t get all the brouhaha about a Spanish rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Is this the first time the song has ever been sung in a foreign language?

Broadcast Report

If you ever wanted to know what a day was like at your local TV news station, R. Neal has your fix. In short, there’s a lot that goes on, even on the most mundane of news days.
Unfortunately (for them) I generally don’t find the content of local news all that interesting, so I rarely watch.
Mr. Neal notes how young many people at the station are. With that kind of hectic work day, I don’t think this is too mysterious. I know someone who used to be a reporter at one of the station. He said he left the business because he was getting too “old” to do that kind of thing. Apparently, running all over the place and doing stories in the middle of the night doesn’t go so well with middle age and family life.
Mr. Neal also points out the expense of such an operation. Recently, I was hanging around a remote live telecast at our church. Someone told me that just one camera/stand combination cost $100,000. If true, that illustrates how many bucks go into TV broadcasting.

Uninsured Blues

Economy on the march:

The percentage of working-age Americans with moderate to middle incomes who lacked health insurance for at least part of the year rose to 41 percent in 2005, a dramatic increase from the 28 percent in 2001 without coverage, a study released on Wednesday found.
Moreover, more than half of the uninsured adults said they were having problems paying their medical bills or had incurred debt to cover their expenses, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based private, health care policy foundation. The study of 4,350 adults also found that people without insurance were more likely to forgo recommended health screenings such as mammograms than those with coverage, and were less likely to have a regular doctor than their insured counterparts.
. . .
About 45.8 million Americans did not have health insurance in 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
. . .
That study found that cost prevented 41.1 percent of uninsured adults from seeing a doctor, compared to 9.2 percent of individuals with coverage

It’s a mystery to me why the news media makes such a big brouhaha about gas prices on the rise, and virtually ignores rising health care costs. Certainly for many Americans health insurance is a greater liability than gasoline prices. I guess it’s easier throwing together footage of people complaining as they gas up their vehicles than it is to report on something complicated like insurance.

Oil Markets Rocked By Bush Oil Speech

Or not.
It was amusing seeing part of the speech on MSNBC with the bold “BREAKING NEWS” caption underneath. Even Bush didn’t seem very interested with what he was saying, as he kept stuttering and making gaffes.
Does anyone seriously think we are going to see any significant deviation in energy policy from the course Cheney Oil plotted in 2001?
But with falling poll numbers, expect plenty more noise and political theater from GOP, Inc. as they “get tough” on gasoline prices.