Michael Ian Black, a really funny dude, wrote up his thoughts about the whole Conan situation. It’s a great read, despite what I think are exaggerations regarding the fervor of “Team Coco,” though I wanted to expand on something he brought up and maybe pivot it a bit.

His early point that Conan is being treated like a working-class folk hero is questionable at best — Conan’s audience has always skewed young, and I doubt that’s changed during the recent surge of support — but his discussion of the origins of his supporters is interesting.

I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

One way of thinking about it is through the corporate world but, to my eyes, the return of Leno’s Tonight Show has much more relevance when analogized to the current political climate.

The world is shitty right now. Especially for the young, presumably liberal, audience of Conan O’Brien. We elected a vibrant young politician to the presidency a little over a year ago with the idea that he would fight for the progressive liberal goals he said he would. Instead he’s fallen prey to the idiotic desire to crawl to the political centre despite a strong electoral mandate to push the things he said he would push. What’s worse, each time his opposition fumbles he creates new compromises, weakens his position, claims that he needs to be more accommodating to the immovable objects he’s tasked with moving.

And here comes Conan. He’s a young vibrant comedian who’s given a chance to run The Tonight Show, to remake it in his image. And he did that. When he first started, he appeared semi-neutered but as he grew more comfortable with the show, he loosened and began to adjust his new surroundings to who he was and not the other way around.

What’s more, when the news came that he was being cast aside, he didn’t compromise, he became more like himself. And, yes, people loved him for it. Because that’s why they were excited about him being there in the first place.

I don’t know about any of you, but Conan going down swinging felt like a win to me. Maybe it’s a shallow one, but it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any real ones any time soon.

There are two essential rationales people can use on the left to blame Obama and the White House for the failure of the Senate to produce a bill with a public option and/or Medicare buy-in provisions.

The first is that Obama is a super-genius 11-dimensional chess master who has been setting up all the pieces to knock them down precisely to accomplish health care reform without these two progressive policies in place.

The second is that Obama can swoop into the Senate, jiggle a few carrots, whack a few sticks, and everyone would fall in line and health care reform would pass with the exact requirements of Obama and his White House without further complications.

Anyone who ascribes to either of these positions is a fool, or really digs the DC universe.

I personally think Obama should have done more to pressure moderate Democrats to toe the line on this issue; I don’t think it would have done any good, but at least Obama would have demonstrated some position. As nice as it is to have a White House administration more interesting in passing legislation than jockeying for power, it doesn’t hurt to bluster on occasion.

But I’m not going to sit here and argue what others have: that Obama is essentially talking a good game in public but sneaking wry grins in private as his plan to limit health care reform unfold. These sorts of extremes do nothing but persist the idea that the executive branch not only does but should have a choke hold on the rest of the government. Quite frankly, even if Obama did have the power and clout to wrangle the Senate into line, which I don’t think he does, shouldn’t we be glad he isn’t doing that? I thought Bush was hated for his abuse of the office, not because he abused it to get things we didn’t like.

Glenn Greenwald has been making much hullabaloo over the White House’s apparent willingness to drop the public option and a medicare buy-in from the Senate health care bill for the sake of getting a bill through Congress before the process manages to collapse in on itself.

Many different progressives have been reminding Glenn that the President isn’t all powerful and that expending his political capital trying to push obstinate senators toward a more progressive bill would almost certainly result in nothing, or worse a deeper obstinacy from senators feeling bullied.

He cites the example of the White House pressuring freshman Democrats with what is essentially ostracism if they don’t vote for a war funding bill as proof that Obama can play hardball with the legislative branch when he really wants something done. But I think this ignores some depressing realities within Congress.

Obama can pressure freshman congressman to support a war bill because they are likely on the left, and people on the left need the support of the DNC and the Obama Administration. But on health care, Obama would have to push people from the Right towards the Left, something for which he can offer no incentives.

Nelson won Nebraska despite Obama losing, not because of it. There’s no pressure he can apply in that situation. And Lieberman is a petulant child who wants only to punish progressive policies. Maybe Obama could have tried the hardball tactics here, and maybe it would have worked, but these two scenarios are not comparable except in the most superficial way.

Dave Weigel over at The Washington Independent wrote last night about a Fox News poll last night asking people who they thought wants victory more, Obama or the Taliban. Now, it’s a fairly ridiculous question to ask — because that’s totally irrelevant unless the gusto with which terrorists try to attack you somehow makes them endearing — but I think the results do reveal a worrying bias.

The fact that Democrats overwhelmingly feel that Obama wants it more is a little troubling. Terrorists (and freedom fighters, if you so choose to think of the Taliban in such terms) do outrageous things for their causes. Like, for example, fly jet planes into building and strap explosives to themselves. I’m sure Obama wants to win in Afghanistan, if only for the political capital it will give to the Democratic party after seven years of Republican negligence in Afghanistan, but I think claiming he ‘wants it more’ than the Taliban stretches the point a bit too far.

A fair point that can be made is that the poll specifically targets the ‘Leadership of the Taliban,’ who might not be willing to strap bombs to themselves so much as they are willing to strap bombs to other people in an attempt to build their own power. I don’t really know enough about the hierarchy of the Taliban and such groups to say if there’s a difference in the radicalism of the leaders vs the ground soldiers, but even targeting the ‘Lords’ of the terrorist movements seems incredulous. When it comes down to it, I can’t imagine Obama worrying that the Taliban will eventually kill him, except in some existential abstract manner, but America wiping out every last Taliban member seems like it would be a fairly realistic worry.

Don’t you need to actually accomplish something to be awarded the Nobel prize?

It’s probably premature in Obama’s case but he’s certainly got a few things he can cite as evidence that he’s been an agent of peace. What has Neda done? She got shot. I don’t mean this as a knock on her sacrifice or her nation’s desire to be free of a theocratic dictatorship, but that’s really all she did.

Ignoring the obvious rules regarding posthumous Nobel prizes I sincerely don’t understand what anyone is thinking when they espouse awarding a Nobel peace prize to a young Iranian university student who happened to get shot during a political protest.

What’s more, the idea of granting it to one of the reformists in Iran seems equally vapid. While it can be said that Obama won the Nobel primarily because he’s not George Bush, I think we forget how negatively the world viewed President Bush. The simple fact that America is represented on a global scale by Barack Obama has already vastly shifted the rhetoric regarding America world-wide. Add in his accomplishments with respect to nuclear proliferation, and his national-level climate change legislation, and his (supposed) desire to end the Bush administrations abuses of human rights, and we’re a lot closer to world peace right now than we were just a year ago. I still think it’s premature for Obama to win the Nobel, but to consider Neda, or her fellow reformers, as a better choice seem laughably parochial.

Generally speaking, I’m OK with what Obama has done so far. I’m not particularly fond of the way he’s handling the economic crisis — it’s a little too deferential to the whims of an industry that imploded through incompetence and greed — but he’s generally improved America. And this is only three months in. That said, I’m not such a fanatic that I can ignore the increasingly serpentine dictates coming from the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.

Glenn Greenwald has been following, and closely scrutinizing, the DOJ’s positions in the hopes that Obama’s campaign rhetoric would lead to real change in the department most disturbed and malformed as a result of Bush’s corrupt administration. There have been advances, none miraculous. But what’s more troubling is the movement towards some of Bush’s positions rather than away. Obama’s Department of Justice continues to strengthen the abuses of power put in place by the Bush administration.

I was sympathetic at first. So early into his term, we shouldn’t be so demanding. Indeed, many of the problems the DOJ is faced would inflict wide-spread collateral damage. But the DOJ is doing more than asking for more time to consider the proper solution, they are fighting to ensure the unjust status quo remains. Get with it, Obama. Fix this shit now.

I remember a few years ago when commercials for Medium were played on the radio. I’d heard the basics of the show and the commercial clued me in as well, and yet despite my love of sci-fi and supernatural stories I had absolutely no desire to watch it. The reason is because it sounded horrendous.

The lines they chose for that commercial were cliched, hackneyed, and emotionless. And I do mean emotionless. I was amazed at the utter lack of conviction from the characters speaking. I was convinced that no matter what I had heard of this new show ‘Medium’ these commercials had to be a joke. Either a parody making fun of the show or the show itself was an elabourate hoax design to get a few laughs from the horrible commercials.

So since then, Medium has managed to become a reliable not-quite-hit-but-still-fairly-popular-in-the-ratings show for NBC, a network with little to no real successes in the last five years. I’m not quite sure why, but there it is, chugging along.

Anyways, recently I noticed some of the writers on Aint It Cool News offering support for Medium, not the kind of support they would give for something like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, but support nonetheless. Tonight since I was watching President Obama’s Press Conference and then Heroes after that, and Medium was coming on after Heroes and this episode of Medium had Sam Trammell (from True Blood) guest starring I figured I’d watch a bit of the show. See what I was missing.

Not. Freaking. Much.

Let me lay out the opening scene for you. A guy and a girl are having network TV sex, that is they’re fully clothed but they’re moaning suggestively, and the guy decided he wants to choke a bitch. She indicates numerous times that he should let up on the choking, because as awesome as oxygen-deprived orgasms are they’re only awesome when you’re not dead. And I should reiterate that this was not awesome cable TV sex where it’s rough and wild. This was slow-thrusting, gentle-and-intimate network TV sex. And yet in the “throes of passion,” he managed to not hear her numerous calls for help until she was dead and he had come.

When he was done, he shook her a little telling her that the game was over, except in a broken phrasing that seemed like it would’ve come from a five year old, and then realized that (gasp!) she was dead. What an unfortunate accident! Oh well, time to dispose of the corpse…

So he drags her off to the nearby ditch and tosses her in. Well, what man hasn’t accidentally killed his date during erotic asphyxiation? He heads back to his car but then — Hark! — he hears her breathing in the ditch. She’s alive! Oh this unfortunate accident will no longer haunt him! Years later, they’ll regale their family with the hilarious-in-hindsight anecdote. Oh wait, no. He picks up a rock and finishes her off… WTF?!?!

That was just the opening scene. I was already amazed at how stupid this show was but it had so much more stupid to offer.

Here’s the thing about procedurals. They all have a basic schema. The crime/medical mystery/whatever occurs in the teaser, and then through intelligence, investigation, and ingenuity the mystery is solved and the story is wrapped up in 44 minutes or so. What Medium does is slightly different¹. The main character, Allison Dubois, get psychic visions of crimes while she sleeps and she can also talk to ghosts that are just hanging around waiting for their murders to be solved or whatever it is that ghosts do. So on Medium, she sees the crime — who did it, who died, where it happened — at the very beginning of the episode. What happens after that has nothing to do with the solving of a murder. She doesn’t have any particular investigative genius, she just gets the answers delivered to her without any effort. (Also, what little I saw of her family’s really stupid B-storyline was really stupid. I hardly paid attention to it because it was really fucking stupid so I’m not going to put any more words to it.)

So, I gave it a shot. I watched almost a full episode. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But it was still much much worse than anything else I watch. It sucked then. It sucks now. Avoid it if you can.

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1. I am, admittedly, basing this off of a single episode but if any episode is this terribly plotted then they fucking deserve it. [↩]

So this moron here is claiming that Obama was disrespectful to Latinos because none of his big cabinet appointments were Latinos despite their avid support of him. He also claims that Alberto Gonzales was a good idea simply because it broached a racial barrier. Completely ignore the gross misconduct and all the other reasons why Gonzales was terrible and just look exclusively at his skin.

First of all, the cabinet of a presidential administration is not there to meet racial quotas or to pay back favors done during the campaign. They are there to advise the president, and ensure their mandates are implemented. (I’m grossly simplifying this because I barely know American politics, and yet I still know this guy’s stupid)

If you think there are more qualified people that should be in Obama’s cabinet that’s a perfectly fine criticism, but they can’t be more “qualified” because of the race of the parents. You fucking idiot.

Second of all, Obama was not a good choice because he’s black, and Gonzales certainly wasn’t a good choice because he’s Latino. The fraction of people that voted for Obama simply to breach a racial barrier in politics is not what won him the presidency. It was his political acumen, in collusion with the economic meltdown and an infamously bad sitting president. I’m sure his race helped him in some groups and hurt him in others. But in the end, he won primarily because he was the best person for the job.

Basically, that guy’s a douche and a moron. He also defends Bush’s appointment of a Latino to Commerce Secretary and immediately follows it up with a rebuke of Obama because he appointed Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary. The guy’s a moron, people.