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Liberals who love public broadcasting are angry at Gov. Chris Christie for moving to fold the state’s public broadcaster, but let its operations be taken over by other public TV and radio entities in the area. Christie told interviewer Bob Hennelly on WNYC public radio that “state-owned operation of media ended with the Soviet Union,” even if that’s not really an end to public broadcasting in New Jersey:

BOB HENNELLY: You had a big win yesterday [Thursday]. But you did have one setback. The Assembly rejected your proposal to have WNET Channel 13 takeover the state's public broadcaster NJN. Critics of the deal say they are concerned WNET won't deliver the quality news product Michael Aron with NJN has been putting out. What's at stake with this deal?

Is someone really going to blame the Mark Halperin remark-and-suspension on....Roger Ailes and Fox News? Yes, Los Angeles Times media reporter Tim Rutten did on Saturday: 

Ever since Roger Ailes created Fox News as a low-budget, ideologically conservative televised version of right-wing talk radio — and swept the ratings table in the process — CNN and MSNBC have been consciously counter-programming their successful rival. One of the casualties of this competition has been legitimate political journalism. The Halperin incident is a natural outgrowth of the direction political reporting has taken on the cable networks, and that, in turn, is a consequence of treating political journalism as entertainment, as talk radio does — a trend that has turned out to be the ideologues' best friend.

Washington Post reporter Anne Hull went after Michele Bachmann on Saturday for trying to play a Tom Petty song at her campaign rallies, since Tom Petty is a memory of her marijuana-baked teen years:

How does a tea party candidate who owns a Christian counseling service on the side go to Iowa, crank up the Alpines and blast Tom Petty as a rallying call to conservative values?

Two eastern European nations last week debuted commemorations to thank former President Ronald Reagan for playing an instrumental role in freeing them from communism. I only found sparse television coverage of the two “Reagan Centennial” events in Hungary and the Czech Republic, but thought I’d share what I located since the events didn’t earn much air time.

The accompanying video first shows a brief item on Wednesday’s Special Report where FNC played some video of a life-size statue of Reagan being unveiled in Freedom Square in front of the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. Second in the video, a short item from MSNBC on Saturday morning about a block of a street in Prague getting named for Ronald Wilson Reagan.

As much as Kossacks would like to believe that Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are peas in a right-wing pod, deep down they realize that their usual knee-jerk insults for Palin -- ditz, quitter, greedy egomaniac -- wouldn't stick to Bachmann. Therefore, they have to come up with more elaborate attacks on the Minnesota congresswoman, and this past week they did just that, perhaps motivated by a Monday prediction from Kos himself that Bachmann will be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
 
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym. Happy Independence Day!

Maybe we ought to nickname him Rip Van Geier.

In his coverage of this weekend's We The People Convention in Columbus, Ohio early Saturday morning, Columbus Dispatch reporter Ben Geier found it "surprising" that many attendees would "go after the Republican Party and House Speaker John Boehner" in expressing their opinions relating to developments in Washington. It's as if he's totally unaware of what the movement's leading members and its grass roots activists have been saying (and proving) since the first anti-stimulus rallies in early 2009 (and at earlier events--see this comment below), since Utah Tea Partiers unceremoniously ousted supposedly entrenched incumbent Bob Bennett in May 2010, and since Ohio Tea Partiers ran serious but largely unsuccessful opposition candidates for State Auditor, Secretary of State, and the State Republican Party's Central Committee slots that spring.

Since Rip Van Geier missed it, here's the message: The Tea Party movement isn't about propping up a party; it's about electing sensible, Constitution-following conservatives to political office regardless of party, revising state and federal laws to reflect constitutional principles, and of course educating the general populace about those principles and their importance.