The most interesting development, however, is that in their effort to expand television advertising, MSNBC, CNN and CNBC “have all rejected a 15-second ad for ‘editorial’ reasons [with] no further explanation provided.”

“This unforeseen censorship effectively puts the brakes on our follow-up marketing efforts where we were trying to reach millions of people unaware of the movie being in theaters now,” Kaslow wrote. “We are continuing with the theatrical release because we have great word of mouth and awareness for the movie increases daily.”

Just a few minutes ago, the producers were good enough to send along a YouTube of the rejected ad with this note: “Here’s the ad.  It’s very simple and certainly in no way offensive[.]”  

See for yourself:

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Not saying there isn’t one, but I would be curious to know what the cable nets “editorial” problem is here.

Fox News’ 3amET comedy/news hybrid Red Eye is in a league of its own when it comes to cable news shows. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a player in the ratings.

Despite its late (or early, depending on your sleep habits) start time, the ratings for the show continue to improve, and surprisingly, top some cable news competition you might not expect.

Last week we were forwarded this message board post on ActivityPit.com – Red Eye’s online community that feeds its dedicated base of fans. Here’s a part:

The ratings came out for September and Red Eye is up over 30% in total viewers and up 50% in the key demo (25-54) since July. They have more overall viewers than every CNBC show, every MSNBC show that is on before Hardball, most of HLN, and American Morning on CNN.

Read the full article here.

Broke is an ambitious movie, covering ground from the subprime meltdown to the relationship between the stock market and the “irrational exuberance” targeted by Professor Robert Schiller.  For all its ambition, the film does come off as a bit scattered, mixing personal stories with broader (and often vaguer) points about the nature of the financial markets.  If you’re looking for a detailed analysis of real estate finance or an explanation of the mismanagement by the federal government and Wall Street, you’re not likely to find it here – this is more of a media critique, and a critique of the American mindset that we should “get rich quick” through the market rather than doing our research. 

The content of the movie, however, isn’t as important as the mood it creates.  It’s a well-cut movie, a high quality production, and it captures the sense of foreboding we all feel about the chaotic state of our economy.  Broke’s finest moments come from its analogies: a visit to an Asian fish market is likened to stock trading; the stock market’s vagaries are likened (and then differentiated) from playing the lottery.  Broke also convincingly tears down the financial news networks like CNBC, which, as creator Michael Covel sees them, are catering to an audience of news junkies in an attempt to score ratings (a point made in less elegant fashion by Jon Stewart in his grilling of Jim Cramer).  In Covel’s view, Americans have stupidly allowed themselves to become pawns of the “know-it-alls” who tell them where and when to invest – they’ve given up the financial autonomy they truly need to make smart investment decisions. 

Broke isn’t the all-encompassing “recession movie.”  What Broke does do in beautiful imagistic fashion, however, is remind us of the situation we now face, even if it doesn’t offer specifics for how to get out of it other than a blanket warning to face up to our responsibilities as investors.  If we take Covel’s advice on that point, we’ll all be a lot better off.

Every time I have started to write a follow-up to last week’s piece about the evolving Jon Stewart, Rick Santelli, Jim Cramer CNBC massacre, new information that altered the narrative slid in over the transom. The newest part of that story comes from a self described progressive (leftist) group called “Fix CNBC” which has seized on Stewart’s gold standard sophomoric schlock attacks to publicly call for CNBC to start being Wall Street’s watch dog instead of its public relations puppy. That ain’t likely to happen and some personal disclosure of my own a bit later will illustrate why.

Stewart Vs. Santelli And Cramer

A week ago, I took issue with the way Jon Stewart took a cheap shot on his “Daily Show” at CNBC’s Rick Santelli. Today, I have limited praise for Stewart’s skewering of CNBC’s “Mad Money” guru, Jim Cramer. If that seems inconsistent or hypocritical (oh gawd, not that), it isn’t. The difference is that when Stewart blasted Santelli, he blasted a straw man of his own making. Santelli did not say what Stewart led his audience to believe he said in order to set up his put-down of Santelli. I did not comment on Stewart’s general tear down of CNBC that followed his Santelli snark because I did not know whether Stewart had taken the video clips he made fun of out of context and still don’t. After that, Cramer went on the Daily Show for national humiliation by a Stewart who demanded to know why Cramer didn’t warn people to sell their stocks. “It’s not a fucking game,” Stewart postured. Cramer could have challenged that and Stewart’s other crock but didn’t.

Why didn’t Cramer point out the video clip that got played ad nauseum on practically every network of him screaming about impending doom in the financial markets on August 3, 2007 before the market bear took hold?

“He [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke] has no idea, and these firms are going to go out of business and he’s nuts, they’re nuts! They know nothing!!!!” (about the Fed not injecting liquidity into the system).

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Why didn’t Cramer talk about his October 5th, 2008 advice on the “Today Show?”

“Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week. I do not believe you should risk those assets in the stock market.” (stock market 30% off its highs?)

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Or this one from October 20, 2008?

“Stop trading these two stocks (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) … this is an outrage … It’s very clear that someone knows what’s happening (and isn’t telling the public).

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I dunno why Cramer didn’t come back at Stewart. On the other hand, opinions abound about the reason Stewart went after CNBC and Cramer in the first place.

“Jon went after Cramer because he hates phonies and hypocrisy,” according to fellow comedian Dennis Miller on Bill O’Reilly’s show.

“I heard people in Stewart’s family lost a lot of money in the market,” O’Reilly said to Miller. (Stewart’s older brother, Larry Leibowitz, is head of US Markets & Global Technology at a Wall Street firm)

“His [Cramer's] real sin was attacking Obama’s economic policies. If he hadn’t done that, Stewart never would have gone after him. Stewart’s doing Obama’s bidding. It’s that simple,” MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson told Politico.com reporter Michael Calderone. “He’s a partisan demagogue.”

The London Telegraph’s Tom Leonard has a thoroughly cynical take: “… chat show cross-pollination. It’s a heinous practice which, in these desperate broadcasting times, viewers are going to see more of. The strategy is simple: keep non-essential guests – film stars, politicians, anyone with something interesting to say – to a minimum so you can concentrate on other people with shows. After dipping his proboscis into [Jon] Stewart’s pollen, Cramer was meant to flutter home with some of his young viewers, curious to see what the fuss was about. Indeed, Cramer had just inserted his schnozzle into The Martha Stewart Show (another NBC show). They pounded some pastry and pretended it was Jon Stewart. It’s all showbiz, after all.”

Not if some of CNBC’s critics have their way.

University of North Carolina business journalism professor Chris Roush proposes a Joe Friday change to just the facts: “The more that CNBC allows its reporters and anchors to state their opinions instead of simply reporting facts, the more it will hurt CNBC in the long run. When you state an opinion and you’re wrong, you cause people to lose millions or billions of dollars. Stating opinion with business news is extremely dangerous. Stating politics in political news is not as dangerous because people know that the person is stating their political viewpoint.” Roush’s point is understandable at a time when so many are looking for someone to blame for their losses instead of looking in the mirror. But the people I see on CNBC are educated, informed people with generally worthwhile points to make about the companies and markets they cover. What’s more, they challenge each other because the facts are often in dispute. Turning that off, as Roush recommends, would probably turn off CNBC’s lights.

“Fix CNBC” wants the lights to stay on for change:

Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism – asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies, and reporting the truth. Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You’ve been so obsessed with getting “access” to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today. You screwed up badly. Don’t apologize – fix it!

CNBC should publicly declare that its new overriding mission will be responsible journalism that holds Wall Street accountable. As a down payment, we ask you to hire some new economic voices – people who have a track record of being right about the economic crisis and holding Wall Street executives’ feet to the fire.”

OK, La Mancha wannabes, mount up. But take it from one who been der, done dat and knows: Ya can fugget about it! Nobody can be right enough often enough to satisfy a herd of TV viewers chasing quick profits and nobody is gonna hold any Wall Street feet to the fire in any real way that matters. Too negative? Read on — and pay special attention to the interwoven tapestry of relationships.

Before joining Lou Dobbs’ “CNN Moneyline” (now “Lou Dobbs Tonight”) in New York, I auditioned for a spot at CNBC in 1989 on the anchor desk with Sue Herera, who is still there. My agent, the late great Sherlee Barish, said that all went well except that my reputation for exposing financial criminality bothered the brass and that they were concerned about having me in their midst. I may ask questions that would alienate the Wall Street biggies and business leaders they hoped to curry favor with. Worse, they were concerned I may find an R. Foster Winans at CNBC, Barish told me.  Winans was The Wall Street Journal “Heard on the Street” columnist who leaked market moving stories to his stock trading buddies and inside information peddlers seemed to be everywhere.

In case you weren’t there or don’t remember the 80s paranoia, Wall Street had crashed, Godzilla market moving “geniuses” like Ivan Boesky with a “talent” for picking takeover targets that spiked in price had been unmasked as insider price riggers while lending institutions were failing because of looters like Charles “Cheating” Keating which, in turn, caused many businesses to close. Anyway, one particular story I had done, Barish said, in the midst of all that really bothered the CNBC boys: My expose on “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” that a great many of the businesses going under at the time were not the result of bad loans made to bad people who should not have gotten them (where have we heard that before?), but the result of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation forcing lenders to classify performing loans as delinquent and call them early. FSLIC Chairman M. Danny Wall demanded MacNeil/Lehrer take that fact out of the story I had done before it aired, but my editor, Gregg Ramshaw, said “no” as did his superiors, a principled stand for which I am still grateful. I was not grateful for the federal bullying that followed, but that’s a story for another time.

In any case, maybe the CNBC people had a point, because at CNN, I angered “The King of Wall Street” at the time, discovered that my boss, Lou Dobbs, had serious journalistic conflicts of interest and found corruption sludge at the now defunct Financial News Network.

That Wall Street king was Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund of “Liar’s Poker” fame, and I earned his ire when I asked him about the way his bond traders, “The Big Swinging Dicks” as they called themselves, were sodomizing Salomon’s customers (and yes, there is something wrong with that). He was especially angry that I called him by the German pronunciation of his name (gootfroind) instead of the English translation (goodfriend) he liked. Gutfreund was no “good friend” to anyone, as far as I was concerned, other than his fellow financial sodomites. Long story short from there: Warren Buffett bought Salomon and fired Gutfreund, lots of lawsuits were filed, Gutfreund was banned from ever running a brokerage firm and CNBC still puts the sonuvabitch on the air as a credible “goodfriend” of investors! I’ve sent CNBC complained to CNBC, but whatcha gonna do? On to the Dobbs man.

Drexel Burnham Lambert of Michael Milken junk bond fame was in trouble when I joined CNN. How much trouble before it crashed several months later never completely got aired, from what I saw, because Lou Dobbs had a conflict. It was common knowledge that Lou wanted to be CNN’s president and that he was threatening to resign and take a big salary job at Drexel if he didn’t get it. Lou’s neighbor was Drexel’s top guy, Fred Joseph, the source of much reassurance that things at Drexel weren’t as bad as nearly everyone suspected or knew them to be. On the night that Drexel finally did crash, Lou told us all after the show that “Fred lied to me.” Maybe he did and maybe Lou was just doing his part all along to try and keep Drexel going for his own benefit as a viable bargaining tool, I certainly don’t know which. But how many people lost serious money because CNN’s reporting was possibly mollified by compromise? And this wasn’t the only example.

When I was assigned to do a story about some 1989 earnings at Shearson, I saw that a big insurance payment gave Shearson a bottom line profit even though it was losing money on its operations and said so in my story. The next day, there was hell to pay for saying that and Lou did a retraction. A week or so later, The Wall Street Journal noted the same thing I did and several other CNN news people took pleasure in pointing it out to me on the sly, always wary of Lou’s mercurial temper tantrums. But why would Lou do a retraction on something that was probably true, I wondered? Well, it did not take long to discover that Lou was being paid by Shearson and some other companies we were reporting on for work he did for them on the side. Lou fired me, but The Wall Street Journal somehow got hold of the story. Can’t imagine how that happened.

click to enlarge

Barish next sent me over to Financial News Network. It was the original network financial news source and the one the fledgling CNBC wanted to challenge. Right away, I began noticing some things that did not look right and soon had confirmations from some in a position to know that CFO Steven Bolen, among others,  was lining his pockets with FNN money and sending it to secret offshore accounts. FNN is now history.

Rest assured that what I’ve just written is only the tip of the Wall Street journalistic ethics iceberg that “Fix CNBC” seems to believe it will be able to melt. To its credit, CNBC has made efforts to eliminate the appearance of impropriety by forbidding its reporters to own individual shares of stock and drawing boundaries on the proper association between reporter and reportee, I’ve been told. That’s a notable change since the network got a black eye from the friendship between its star, Maria Bartiromo (an off air producer at CNN when I was there whose CNBC star status is well deserved, by the way), and former Citigroup executive Todd Thomson. Thomson flew Bartiromo on Citgroup’s private jet from New York to Beijing to host a party costing five million Citigroup dollars in 2007. It’s also a change from the time I watched Bartiromo coo to JP Morgan Chase Chairman Bill Harrison (my upper class counselor at Virginia Episcopal School) that she owned 1,000 shares of a certain bank stock. “Maybe you should buy more,” he said. That may not sound like much, but Bartiromo is married to Jonathan Steinberg, son of mega investor Saul Steinberg. And a suggestion from Harrison to “buy more” could be taken as a tip and cause a large position to be taken. Now, what about those people who are consistently right and will hold Wall Street executives feet to the fire that “Fix CNBC” wants hired?

I’ve been closely involved in the markets since 1970, and in all that time I have yet to see anybody who could consistently tell a mass audience which specific stocks will make them money. Every generation has its guru that rides a trend or makes some dramatic right call (remember Joe Granville?), but they tend to fade away after the conditions that made them hot stuff change– which they do. There are simply too many market variables, too many ways of interpreting winners (today, next week, next year?) and stock calls made on TV are too public to keep working even if they are correct. The simple reason is that once too many people start buying the same stock, it tends to stop rising because there are too few people left to buy and too many already in who want to sell and protect profits. The bottom line: Jim Cramer probably does as good a stock picking and market education job as it is possible to do on TV. As for holding Wall Street feet to the fire, antagonize the suits too much, and they’ll stop talking to reporters and start talking to their lawyers about defamation of character, harassment, loss of reputation, tortuous interference, you get the picture.

CNBC doesn’t want that headache and neither do any other news organizations I can imagine, especially during these tough financial times. So take it from one who has been tossed off company premises many times and dealt with death threats from criminals of all sorts, CNBC is not going to start burning Wall Streeters unless it has people like my former news director, Jim Topping (now the retired president of KGO-TV, San Francisco), who knew exposing financial crime was the right thing to do, knew I had the goods on the crooks and was willing to stare the bastards down. I don’t believe CNBC has people with that sort of gut in management who are willing to give up their Four Seasons table or toni party invites in order to rake Wall Street. Neither do I believe there are many reporters around these days with the background or desire to spot legitimate fraudulent activity and expose it before law enforcement does. The ability to do that is not learned in business school, a background shared by most of the bright, articulate faces on CNBC. And that’s why “Fix CNBC” is probably going to have to be happy with the police holding Wall Street feet to the fire while CNBC shows the perp walk.

It’s been a few days, so you have to wonder if Cramer’s figured it out yet — or if someone’s explained it to him. He certainly hadn’t pieced it together during his appearance on the “Daily Show” where he looked liked a fighter who didn’t see the punch coming – and he didn’t. Why would he? Through months and months of recession, Cramer’s been on the air doing what he’s been doing for years:  Ranting, raving, predicting, promoting, suggesting, picking, pointing, and putting himself across as some kind of Market Seer –just like so many others out there, only he uses action figures.

Cramer’s transgression had nothing to do with any part of the thrashing he took from Jon Stewart. Cramer, an Obama supporter, committed the sin of turning on Barack Obama with his “wealth destroyer” comment.

Had Cramer not hammered Obama, does anyone believe Stewart would have given him the attention he did? The same is true with Rick Santelli. How long has Santelli been doing what he does on CNBC? But it’s only after Santelli criticized Obama that Stewart found something about Santelli (and CNBC) to get morally indignant over. There was only one dynamic that changed here, and that wasn’t how CNBC, Santelli or Cramer do business, it was that they criticized Barack Obama.

But Stewart employs a sleight of hand to keep the rules of the game below the radar. He can’t thrash and humiliate these men for criticizing Obama, that would give the game away, so he finds something else. But the pop culture rules of the game are clear: Stay in line or we will humiliate you. And “we” is Stewart and all those who participate in the viral aspect of Stewart’s game of humiliation.

And don’t confuse this with a defense of Cramer or any of the noisy, smarter-than-thou market guys. But unlike Jon Stewart, I’m not smug enough to believe I’m the only one who can see through their schtick. This, of course, would’ve been Cramer’s defense – standing up for the intelligence of his audience and the investor crowd. But I guess only Jon Stewart is smart enough to know bad investment advice when he hears it, even though Stewart didn’t appear to give much of a damn about “the rubes” until Cramer and Santelli dared stray from the liberal talking points.

People who have reached a time of life when they’re in a position to invest are generally a pretty savvy bunch able to discern and make decisions on their own, it’s those not fully formed we should worry about, which is why Jon Stewart’s detached irony and refusal to honor anything other than his own outrage is much more of a pox on society than CNBC.

In the movie “Tin Men“ (1987) there’s a scene where a dishonest aluminum-siding salesman drops a five-dollar bill in the home of a potential sale and then asks the homeowner if the bill belongs to him. The hustle is obvious: do something dishonest to con the sucker into believing you’re honest. In the first minute of this video, you’ll see Jon Stewart drop his own five-dollar bill when he refers to what he does as selling snake oil.

It’s a nice feint on Stewart’s part, a disingenuous shot at humility, a way to hide behind the “I’m just a comedian” card he’s been pulling for years, but Stewart and Co. take themselves very seriously and a flag has been planted and a message sent that there will be a heavy price to pay for criticizing President Obama.

Something didn’t sound quite right when I listened to Jon Stewart’s set-up for his sarcastic blast of CNBC’s Rick Santelli as a hypocrite who thinks federal bailout money for corporate America is just fine while a helping hand from Uncle Sam (a bailout by another name) for strapped mortgage holders isn’t. So I reverted to the method I’d come to rely on while an investigative reporter when I could not follow what a fast talking con artist was actually saying: I transcribed what he said. And sure enough, the words on paper revealed Stewart’s sophistry that my ears could not pinpoint:

Actually, our guest tonight was supposed to be this guy. His name is Rick Santelli. He’s an analyst for CNBC and he’s a former derivatives trader. The reason he became famous was because of a sort of Howard Beale moment on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He had done some critical reporting on the hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout money going to failed banks, failed auto makers and insurers of failed banks and auto makers (laughter). But when it looked like the president wanted a small percentage of that money to go to actual homeowners, whu ho!!!!! (laughter). David Banner became The Incredible Santelli.

As you can plainly see, Stewart admits Santelli was critical of the federal bailout money that went to fat cats. Why that got a laugh makes me wonder whether Stewart’s audience warm-up includes nitrous oxide. But Stewart could not continue with that acknowledgment and still expect to rip Santelli for being a hypocrite, the most dastardly of demons in the pop pantheon of evil (except for those hypocrites on the political left, of course), because he would then be left without the necessary hypocrisy peg on which to hang Santelli for derision. So Stewart did the only thing he could do, he did a quick trick of the tongue to make the listener forget what he just said.

Stewart did that by quickly implying through his energy and tone of voice that Santelli was for big corporate bailouts but against little homeowners in dire straits being given some tax dollar help. The actual switch is obfuscated within the emotional context of Stewart’s transition. It’s a verbal illusion common to con men, comedians, politicians (which covers both) and some others who make their living manipulating people with spoken words. Some have to learn it, others do it naturally. I’ve no idea which category Stewart falls in, but I first had the technique defined to me and demonstrated while working at a carny side show in Ocean City, Maryland one summer. In it, a pitchman would regularly shame hundreds of people at a time for being greedy, dishonest victimizers of his good nature when they would expect to be given a prize he had offered them earlier for free. Call it an oral bait and switch. Some caught on and walked, but enough actually paid for the item to assuage the guilt the pitchman had tricked them into feeling for him and the show to keep a nice cash flow going.

Whether Stewart is good enough to pull off that pitchman’s trick in front of a cold audience I can’t say, but he was certainly good enough to manipulate his warmed studio audience, his predisposed home audience and the national media’s perception (ok, it’s generally predisposed to Stewart’s side too) of what Santelli actually said to what he wanted them to believe he said. He had to in this case because without creating the impression that Santelli was talking out of both sides of his mouth, Stewart’s whole rip would have made no more sense than his mixed Beale and Banner metaphors except in that alternate sophomoric universe where facts and form don’t matter. But isn’t that where we have been culturally stalled for some time? You know (residuals to Caroline Kennedy), the cosmos where even if something isn’t true, it’s still the truth (more on that line later) because the lie validates the biases generally held by most, in this case, who watch Stewart’s show?

But that’s OK — to a point.

Stewart isn’t doing real news and both he and those behind the scenes are candid about that. Comedy Central Network describes “The Daily Show” as the top name in fake news while its writers say “they do not have any journalistic responsibility and that as comedians their only duty is to provide entertainment.” All literally true. So is one wag’s alternate title for Stewart’s show: “We Pander to Liberals & Attack Conservatives without Scruple,” a rather self evident fact. Even so, Stewart is doing satires on the news which means that, like Michael Moore’s “documentaries,” he cannot be hamstrung by fact, because satire is comedy and, as Moore says, “how can comedy be factual?” even if it’s packaged within a form that is by definition supposed to be a documentation of fact?

What is bothersome about Stewart’s “Daily Show” in that respect is that those who watch it, by my observation at least, tend to be some of America’s brightest in terms of an SAT score. My anecdotal conclusion is buttressed somewhat in a 2004 presidential election study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. According to Annenberg researchers, “Daily Show” viewers “know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news.” Those sampled were asked things like “Who favors allowing workers to invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market?” Answer: Bush. And “Who urges Congress to extend the federal law banning assault weapons?” Answer: Kerry. If those two questions are indicative of the rest and set the current bar for being well informed, we have dumbed down as a people much farther than I ever thought.

But if Stewart’s viewers are the best informed, I must also note that most of those viewers I have contact with also qualify as some of this country’s most arrogant, angry and intellectually dishonest. All are traits of successful sarcasm just as they tend to be endemic to those who are the most sarcastic. I await correction if wrong, but my recollection of Stewart’s vicious, cheap shots (another element of sarcasm) at Tucker Carlson’s expense when he tried to do a friendly interview of Stewart causes me to believe I’m spot on. I’m not a fan of Carlson’s dancing or bow ties either, but he appears to be a genuinely nice man who did nothing to provoke the nastiness that Stewart hit him with. If that behavior was the real Stewart, it reveals a repugnant characteristic I have also found among Stewart’s biggest fans. In short, they are often the luminaries of a dark matter, Parkeresque universe in which an ideological whore can be led to knowledge, but not made to think, even within my own family.

A number of those members are past or present top academics at such schools as Johns Hopkins, Duke, UCLA, Stanford and Harvard. They are different people at different universities but they all have one thing in common: their main TV “news” source is Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show.” Same for most of their faculty friends and students from what I have seen. The reason seems to be that they tend to be angry souls who find vicarious release in Stewart’s attacks on people and ideas they consider “bad” (aka conservative) without having to worry that he will gore their own liberal oxen except as an exercise in tokenism. That is especially disturbing because these are the very people that claim to be learned and open minded, but in fact, often do nothing more than perpetuate long disproved beliefs and even outright academic frauds. There are many examples, but two among the college smorgasbord of deceit will do.

RIGOBERTA MENCHU

When “I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala” won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her book, Menchu’s first person, personally written account of the evils of capitalism and the brutality of the US financed Guatemalan military against her and other Guatemalan indigenous peoples became required reading in many college classrooms. Still is, even after the book was exposed as a fraud. According to those who checked out her story, Menchu did not write the book, a French Marxist did. Neither did the events in the book happen to her as claimed. They were fabricated along Marxist narrative lines to sell that ideology. So why is an academic fraud still being taught as fact? When I asked Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish department at Wellesley College that question many years ago, she said, “Even if it isn’t true, it is still the truth.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Many professors say they will stand by Rigoberta Menchu’s memoir”) quotes Agosin as saying, “Whether her book is true or not, I don’t care.” Other professors told me the same thing in different words.

MICHAEL BELLESILES:

When Emory University professor Michael A. Bellesiles published “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture,” he was roundly hailed for having proven the National Rifle Association and its affiliated “gun nuts” had been lying about historical evidence that the Second Amendment was a guarantee of an individual’s right to own a gun. Bellesiles was
awarded Columbia University’s prestigious Bancroft Prize, among others. That was until a researcher named Clayton Cramer discovered that Bellesiles made it all up. Bellesilles was forced to resign from Emory, his publisher pulled the book and Columbia took back its prize. No matter, Oxford University hired Bellesiles as a distinguished professor and put his book back on the market where it continues to spread an academic fraud.

True to the origin of the term, sarcasm is an especially appropriate form of humor to attack those one hates because of the way it shreds its targets when done well. Stewart certainly does that. But if all humor is redirected hostility and those who tell jokes for a living are inflicting their own inner pain via words that they would like to inflict by physical force if they had the nerve to do it, as I am told, how many comedians besides Ray Romano would dare admit that they would be accountants if their fathers had told them they loved them? More to the point, do we really want to have a comedian’s personal demons setting the standard for national discourse?

There’s a new gold rush on but you don’t have to head to the hills of California to be part of it.  All you have to do is tune in to talk radio and jot down an “800″ number where a few of the big syndicated shows pimp for the gold merchants.  The ads for these companies are all over radio and television.

I have no problem with a host or show taking advertising from any product.  If Rush wants to run a few Obama ads, no problem. If Dr. Savage can sell ads to the ACLU, I say he should give his sales staff a bonus. I’m a capitalist all for making a nickel who believes in the old saying, caveat emptor – buyer beware.  Yet, it’s different when the host reads the commercial live.  This signifies a level of approval beyond “we let this guy buy ads on our show.”

Here’s my problem: when you rant about Obama’s negativity bringing the economy down, that’s one thing, but when you turn around and urge your listeners to buy gold because things are going to get worse, that’s hypocrisy.

The idea behind the new gold rush is that the country is going to hell in a hurry with the new socialism and we had all better rush out and buy gold because the way things are going our currency will soon be worthless. If you want food and fuel, you better have gold because we’ll all be bartering for essentials. This is fear mongering from guys who are down on Obama for fear mongering.

The worst offender is one of my favorite radio guys, Glenn Beck. The other day I was listening to his show and heard his long commercial for a gold advertiser. It was beyond an endorsement; it was a monologue about the coming crisis. He basically said that if you don’t get some gold today, you’re setting yourself and your family up to starve to death next year. Glenn could be right; we could be headed to a complete breakdown of the international economic and social structure. I don’t think so, but if we are, a little gold won’t help. It’s not like the Kroger would still be open to take filings off your Krugerrand for groceries. It’s not likely  some orderly barter system will replace your ATM card.

If you don’t think society’s breaking down, then buying gold retail is not a great investment.  First, gold is at an all-time high and I don’t know anyone who thinks buying at the top of the market is a good move.  I know ads say the price could be $1500 by the end of the year, but the price could be at $300 by the end of the year and your investment down 70 percent. If you want security, don’t buy gold, take your money out from under the mattress and buy a CD at your local bank. Second, if you call one of those “800″ numbers, you’re not going to get the spot price you see on CNBC. The broker’s percentage on buying and selling precious metals makes the guy in the suit at Merrill Lynch nicking you for 3 or 4 points look like a piker.

If you do believe Armageddon is just around the corner, learn to grow your own food and make sure you can field dress an animal. Teach your kids to hunt and fish. Get guns and lots of ammo. Before you do, let me know, because I want to get a few shares of Smith and Wesson.