All premiers on broadcast, none worth watching unless you’re into the train wreck that is Bristol Palin.

• ABC Family– O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• AMC– Overboard (totally misogynist)
• Disney– Halloweentown
• ESPN– Pats @ Aquatic Mammals
• Food– Unwrapped, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Triple D (premiers)
• History– American Pickers (premier)
• Lifetime– Flirting With Forty x 2
• Spike- The Hills Have Eyes
• TBS– Family Guy night
• Turner Classic– Penthouse, Skyscraper Souls
• Toon– Regular Show, Total Drama World Tour (premiers)

Later-

• AMC– Rubicon, Mad Men (this week’s repeats), You’ve Got Mail (a Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan movie that doesn’t suck)
• FX– Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later
• Sci Fi– The Resistance (premier), Stargate Universe (repeat of Season Premier)
• Turner Classic– Touch of Evil (really good)

Dave hosts Bruce Willis (a waste of time) will.i.am, and Nicki Minaj.  Jon has Sam Harris, Stephen Eugene Robinson.  Alton does Salt.

Boondocks– The Garden Party (Series Premier repeat)

Nigga, if you ruin this party for me, I’ll put my…

Ruin the party? They love me. These people aren’t worried about us. They’re not worried about anything. They’re rich. No matter what happens, these people just keep applauding.

…

Attention please. Attention please. My name is Uncle Ruckus, no relation. I want to sing y’all a brand new song I just wrote called “Don’t Trust Them New Niggers Over There”. Sing along if you know the words.

Don’t trust them new niggers over there

Leaving they nigger essence in the air

Them happy, nappy head niggers

With they finger on the trigger

Don’t trust them new niggers over there

Don’t trust them big nostrils over yonder

They suck up so much air it’ll make you wonder

Don’t them new niggers

With they spidey little nigger figures

Don’t trust them new niggers over there.

I think the N-word is OK as long as they say it.

…

Excuse me. Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11. Thank you for your time and good night.

How many times have I told you you bet’ not even dream of tellin’ white folk the truth? You understand me? Shoot… makin’ white people riot. You better learn how to lie like me. I’m gonna find me a white man and lie to him right now.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Europe triumph in thrilling Ryder Cup finale

by Rob Woollard, AFP

1 hr 21 mins ago

Monday Business Edition

Economics isn’t much of a science.

Sure they try and dress it up with the maths and produce the pretty graph, but in the end the letters are all just acronyms designed to make words look like numbers and somehow impart the dignity of 2 + 2 = 4 to arguments considerably more specious (a hard currency pun).

Take for instance Keynesian.  Today it’s being thrown as a slur and adopted to include almost anything that’s not related to Monetary policy and a Friedmanite/Greenspan fantasy land where government employment doesn’t produce anything of value (otherwise Capitalists would be doing it, by definition) and the concept of ‘public good’ is unknown.

The 2 leading schools of economic thought in the United States are the Freshwater School centered on the University of Chicago where Friedman taught and the Saltwater School which would be every one else.  Krugman has an essential summary.

But they’re both Monetarist Schools and Monetary Policy prescriptions don’t work when you have zero interest rates and incredible liquidity but your problems are under capacity utilization, over supply, and lack of aggregate demand.  You can’t push a string.

Then you need Fiscal Policy and deficits don’t matter.  We’ve grown or devalued our way out of every deficit we’ve ever had, our Currency is Sovereign (when I pay off my T-Bills I give you nice shiny greenbacks and tell you they taste great in a vinagrette), and who gives a rat’s ass about devaluation anyway, the only people it hurts are bankers and billionaires and they both deserve a spanking (some prefer the haircut metaphor).

My point about labels is this-  my views about macro economics, political economy, are what is properly called Neo-Classical Synthesis believe it or not because they’re grounded in Samuelson’s seminal 1948 Economics.  Krugman, DeLong, Stiglitz, Reich, etc. get called Neo Keyesians but that’s not what they’re really about, they’re all Samuelson Neo-Classicists.  Part of the problem with academic debate is that there has to be some otherwise you might lose your phony baloney job or, even worse, go out and teach some smelly undergraduates instead of sitting in your office writing papers.

Neo Liberal is an entirely different philosophy, but because lazy and stupid media people think anything new is Neo even though they live in the matrix and Liberal is Goldwater and Nixon, that one gets thrown around a lot too.

Krugman–

The point is that we have perfectly good models  for thinking about the state we’re in – models in which we can describe what all the agents are doing and why, models that have done a very good job in terms of predicting how events have proceeded. Moving back and forth between simple new Keynesian models and their IS-LM translations, it was straightforward to show that a huge expansion in the monetary base could and would go along with continuing disinflation, that massive government borrowing would not cause an interest rate spike, and so on.

So what’s wrong with my “one model to rule them all”? Well, it doesn’t easily translate into anything that looks like monetarism – for a good reason: when short-term interest rates are near zero, the distinction between the monetary base, which the central bank controls, and the much broader class of safe short term assets, which it doesn’t, more or less vanishes. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature; it says that when you’re in a liquidity trap, thinking in terms of the supply and demand for money is just not a helpful way to approach the issues.

More Krugman–

But maybe this is an opportunity to reiterate a point I try to make now and then: economics is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The market economy is a system for organizing activity – a pretty good system most of the time, though not always – with no special moral significance. The rich don’t necessarily deserve their wealth, and the poor certainly don’t deserve their poverty; nonetheless, we accept a system with considerable inequality because systems without any inequality don’t work. And before the trolls jump in to say aha, Krugman concedes the truth of supply-side economics, that’s not an argument against progressive taxation and the welfare state; it’s just an argument that says that there are limits. Cuba doesn’t work; Sweden works pretty well.

And when we’re experiencing depression economics, by which I mean a situation in which it’s hard to create sufficient demand to achieve full employment – mainly because short-term interest rates are up against the zero lower bound – the essentially amoral nature of economics becomes even more acute. As I’ve said repeatedly, this is a situation in which virtue becomes vice and prudence is folly; what we need above all is for someone to spend more, even if the spending isn’t particularly wise.

The trouble in practice is that conventional modes of thought tend to prevail even when they shouldn’t; in particular, public spending on the scale needed never seems to happen. That’s why Keynes facetiously proposed burying bottles full of cash in coal mines, so people could dig them up again: since any proposal to spend money on things we need got shot down on grounds of prudence and efficiency, he proposed completely pointless spending instead.

Still More Krugman–

What I’d say about America now is that we have big problems, very much including too much talent going into financial fiddling, too few people who actually make stuff – actually, I worry as much or more about machinists as I do about scientists and engineers. But that observation has virtually no bearing on high unemployment right now. So I’d hope we can walk and chew gum at the same time, appreciating the structural problems but not letting that understanding get in the way of fighting the immediate jobs crisis.

Robert Reich–

My argument is just to opposite. For three decades American consumers managed to maintain demand despite flat real wages. They did this by sending women into paid work, working longer hours, and then borrowing to the hilt. But all these coping mechanisms have come to an end. So it’s only now that we have to face the reality that most Americans have not shared in America’s prosperity.

Now with 26 Stories from Yahoo Business News.

Premiers are back.  Amazing Race for my friend who likes that, Simpsons, Cleveland Show, Family Guy, and American Dad for me.   In Throwball, Bears @ Giants.  Mets lose 2 – 1 in 14, 79 – 83 on the season.

• A&E– The Glades marathon (including premier)
• AMC– The Perfect Storm, Rubicon and Mad Men (premiers)
• Bravo– House marathon
• Comedy– South Park Imaginationland Trilogy
• Disney– Jonas LA (Season Finale- don’t clap too loud)
• Discovery– Life marathon
• Food– Challenge (premier), Next Iron Chef x 3 (Season Premier)
• History– [Ice Road Truckers ] marathon (2 premiers)
• Lifetime– Mini’s First Time, Swimfan
• Sci Fi– The Pumpkin Karver, The Reeds
• TBS– Shooter x 2 (again and again)
• Turner Classic– Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, To Kill a Mockingbird
• TNT– A Time to Kill
• Toon– Beetlejuice, Delocated (premier)
• Vs.– Miami Indy 300 (repeat of Season Finale)

Later-

• FX– Hitman
• Sci Fi– Swamp Devil, Dying Breed
• TBS– Exit Wounds
• Turner Classic– Phantom (shhhh)
• USA– The Pacifier, Eight Below

Adult Swim- New Childrens Hospital and Metalocalypse.  The Venture Brothers, Everybody Comes to Hank’s.  Last week’s Every Which Way But Zeus summary.

Just get up off the ground, that’s all I ask. Get up there with that lady that’s up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. And you won’t just see scenery; you’ll see the whole parade of what Man’s carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so’s he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That’s what you’d see. There’s no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties. And, uh, if that’s what the grownups have done with this world that was given to them, then we’d better get those boys’ camps started fast and see what the kids can do. And it’s not too late, because this country is bigger than the Taylors, or you, or me, or anything else. Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light. They’re right here; you just have to see them again!

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Now with 41 Top Stories.

1 Troubled Games come alive in fortress Delhi

by Martin Parry, AFP

Sun Oct 3, 12:50 pm ET

289 Stories served.  41 per day.

This is actually the hardest diary to execute, and yet perhaps the most valuable because it lets you track story trends over time.  It should be a Sunday morning feature.

• Sunday 9/26
• Monday 9/27
• Tuesday 9/28
• Wednesday 9/29
• Thursday 9/30
• Friday 10/1
• Saturday 10/2

Lots of College Throwball, Notre Dame @ Boston College or Stanford @ Oregon, and Florida @ Alabama.

Speed has the conclusion of The Petit Le Mans this season’s final race in the American LeMans series.  They started at 11 am and it’s a 10 hour or 1000 mile race so I expect the field and Class winners to be pretty well sorted out by the time you tune in.  They have 2 Classes of GP cars, GP and GP 2 (which are the 2 seat open cockpit cars), and GT and GT 2 (which are both recognizable ‘street machine’ based classes with marques like Porsche and Corvette), that all race at the same time so there’s a lot of overtaking.  Since the races are so long there’s often time to repair quite a bit of damage and I suspect all the most spectacular crashes will be long forgotten.

And on Vs. the much more thrilling conclusion (if you like open wheel Turn Left racing) of the IndyCar (think Danica Patrick) racing season at the Miami Indy 300.

Oh, and the Mets won today.  Season Finale tomorrow.

• ABC Family– Good Burger, Major Payne
• Animal Planet– Pit Boss (premier)
• Bravo– Legally Blonde x 2 (again and again)
• Comedy– Napoleon Dynamite
• Disney– Fish Hooks (yesterday’s premier)
• E!– The Good Girl
• ESPN– Penn State at Iowa
• ESPN2– Stanford at Oregon or Washington at USC (whichever one you’re not watching on ABC)
• Food– Next Iron Chef marathon (including last Season Finale)
• Lifetime– August Rush, Akeelah and the Bee
• Nick– iCarly, True Jackson VP (premiers)
• Oxygen– Bad Boys II, Catwoman x 2
• Sci Fi– Children of the Corn (crappy 2009 remake), The Graves
• TBS– Gladiator (Joey? … Joey?)
• Turner Classic– Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands
• TNT– Catch Me if You Can
• Toon– Beetlejuice
• USA– NCIS marathon
• TV Guide– Will be totally useless tonight, Home Fries, Love Potion No. 9

Dueling Stallones–

• AMC– Cliffhanger
• VH1– Rocky III, Rocky IV
• Spike– Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo (both x 2)

Later-

• ABC Family– Coming to America
• Sci Fi– Bird Flu Horror, Perkins’ 14
• TBS– 3000 Miles to Graceland, Unleashed
• Turner Classic– Gun Crazy, They Live by Night
• TNT– Runaway Jury, The Long Kiss Goodnight

SNL has Bryan Cranston and Kanye West.  GitS: SAC– Ag2O and Angel’s Share (Episodes 16 & 17).

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Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 French unions up ante with latest pension protest

by Frederic Jeammes, AFP

1 hr 51 mins ago

What Rick Sanchez said about CNN and Jews

By  Greg Sargent, October 1, 2010; 2:16 PM ET

I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

UPDATE, 3:04 p.m.: Let me try to be a bit clearer. The charitable interpretation of what he said — and I mean charitable  — is that Sanchez’s mind was on the white liberals he’d been ranting about. In the first half of the offending quote he was referring to them:

I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart.

Then, in the second half, he addressed what his questioner had said about Jews:

And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

The problem is that even if he meant these comments in the less offensive way, he used the word “they” in that second half before saying “the people in this country who are Jewish.” This will be impossible for him to clarify. And, again, he very well have meant the comments in the worst way.

UPDATE, 6:23 p.m.: CNN fires Sanchez in a terse, two-sentence statement.

Today’s theme?  Bigotry got nothing to do with it.

The Networks have pretty much shot off all their popguns and you’re seeing a more normal schedule of repeats punctuated by shiny objects because original programming is so expensive and people will watch whatever kind of crap anyway.

We can do better than that.

• AMC– Troy (Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?)
• Bravo– A Knight’s Tale x 2
• Disney– Wizards of Waverly Place, Fish Hooks Phineas and Ferb (premiers)
• Discovery– Beyond Survival With Les Stroud (premier)
• E!– The Soup (premier)
• ESPN– College Throwball, BYU @ Utah State
• ESPN2– Ryder Cup Highlights, High School Throwball from Arizona, Hamilton @ Chandler
• Food– Chopped Champions (repeat of this week’s Finals), Meat and Potatoes (premier)
• FX– Walk the Line
• Sci Fi– Friday Night Smackdown, here to hate, has what exactly to relate it to science fiction?  Tights and Make Up?  Seriously?  Also new Haven.
• Style– Disclosure (again)
• TBS– A Few Good Men x 2
• Turner Classic– Horror of Dracula, The Brides of Dracula (it’s Hammer time, with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing)
• TLC– Say Yes to the Dress marathon (with premier)
• TNT– The Green Mile
• Toon– Sym-Bionic Titan, Generator Rex, Clone Wars (premiers)
• USA– House marathon

Later-

• AMC– The Silence of the Lambs
• Disney– Wizards of Waverly Place marathon
• ESPN2– Australian Rules Football Championship, live from Melbourne!  Collingwood vs. St. Kilda.
• Sci Fi– Stargate Universe (Season Premier repeat), Haven (same new), Caprica (Series Premier repeat)
• Turner Classic– Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave
• TNT– Entrapment
• USA– The 40-Year-Old Virgin (from the star of the inferior The Office)

Dave hosts Blake Lively, Michael C. Hall, and Drake.  No Alton.  No Keith or Rachel.  Childrens Hospital, the good The Office with Ricky Gervais.

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

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