No Girlz Aloud
Here’s the lineup for the big newsmakers on tomorrow’s shows.
ABC News this Week: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA). Topics: The nation’s economy, a possible national stimulus plan, and the fiscal crisis facing his state. Plus, Schwarzenegger’s thoughts on the future of the Republican Party and his state’s passage of the same-sex marriage ban Proposition 8.
CBS’ Face The Nation: Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) Chairman, House Financial Services Committee; Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) Ranking member, Senate Banking Committee; Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA); Newt Gingrich (R) Former House Speaker.
Fox News Sunday: An update on Capitol Hill’s plans for dealing with the financial crisis from Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ)., and Byron Dorgan (D-ND). Plus Gov. Tim Pawlenty, (R-MN) and Michael Steele. And the Fox News All Stars.
NBC’s Meet The Press: Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Co-Chair of the Senate Auto Caucus and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), Ranking Member of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Topics: Pressure on the Government to bailout the U.S. auto industry. Then, T. Boone Pickens on how our nation’s energy dependence effects both our environment and our economy. Roundtable: New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman; Washington Correspondent For BBC World News America, Katty Kay, NBC News Correspondent Andrea Mitchell; and Tavis Smiley.
Notice something different from what the shows had for the last nine months or so, when we had a girl (either Hillary or Palin) competing to be President or Vice President of the United States?
No more girlz–at least none besides the Washington villager pundits.
Now, some of these decisions make sense. I have no complaint that Carl Levin–one of the biggest auto bailout champions in Congress–is matched up against Richard Shelby–who’s trying to make the world safe for Japanese SUVs built in Alabama’s non-union plants. Similarly, House Financial Services Chair Barney Frank against Senate Banking Ranking Member Richard Shelby makes sense for partisan balance. Hopefully Arnie will get on and talk about how Prop 8 is evil and bad for the economy. Though if you really wanted to talk about Prop 8, don’t you think it would have been a good idea to get someone whose marriage may have just been dissolved, like Ellen Degeneres? Pawlenty and Steele make sense if you want to talk about how the Republican party might drag itself out of the hole it’s in. Bobby Jindal, for the same reason … But Newt? And are Kyl and Dorgan the only people who know about a potential financial bailout?
Maybe I’m just being really picky. But during the entire primary and general election season, we had a lot of new girlz on the Sunday shows to talk politics: Claire McCaskill, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Carly Fiorina (till she got banned by the McCain campaign), Jane Swift, and many more.
But all of a sudden, now that there’s no chance a girl will be President or Vice President next year, voila! No more girlz on the Sunday shows.
Barney Frank is the only progressive on CBS’s line-up and far-right Shelby is joined by Jindal and Gingrich, so Shelby looks like the Sioux at Wounded Knee. Not much balance there.
And Shelby’s grandstanding got him gigs at NBC, too. When will the Dems learn that being iconoclastic is not always a bad thing, especially when the ideas you have to sell are actually good for people rather than only good for the patrician class.
My bad. “Barney” looks like the Sioux at Wounded Knee; it’s Shelby who has plenty of troops just itchin’ to fire at women and children and UAW workers.
Yeah, I was going to allege that Katty Kyl was the token woman; but I guess they do have Katty Kay and Kitty Mitchell.
traditional religious values and all that rot like to maintain stereotypes… i do notice how all the top issues are financial – either directly related to bailouts, whether of wall st or the auto industry… it helps to have a printing press working 24/7 while a joker in a suit tells you their is never any inflation…maybe women have a harder time being dishonest, but i doubt it.. not sure why more women aren’t in the public eye, other then my first comment being partly responsible..
Katty Kay is arguably a grrl. Andrea Mitchell is quite arguably neutered. I too would like to see more of the feminine persuasion, but remember that Sunday Talk is old school. Where did Cokie Roberts go? Why not Ariana? Why not Rachel Maddow?
I don’t think Pres or VP is it (although many African American newscasters seem to be getting more air time). I think it is the Sarah Palin effect. Since she proved that women have no idea what they are talking about and cannot even get through a “soft” interview…(Ok, wife, stop hitting me, I was using SarcasticFont(tm)). In fact it was Katie Couric proving that she EARNED her way to that spot, and can do a hard hitting interview without the contensiousness her colleagues would have to use. The failure is not in the stars, my friend, it is in ourselves. Why doesn’t MSNBC give Rachel a Sunday News Show like Chris Matthews. (Because nobody would watch, just like her other shows… Ok, wife, stop hitting me I was using SarcasticFont(tm)).
I was counting Mitchell and would count Cokie as Villager pundits.
The point is–of the newsmakers–as opposed to newstalkers–there are no girls.
And you can just hear the sighs of relief from the Sunday bookers that they don’t have to find female guests anymore. It’s hard enough on them that they have to let Democrats in the club…
I want to get hold of these guys and ask ‘Newt who??’
If you cross Gingrich with Rove do you get Newt Turd?
Kansas City television station KMBC (an ABC affiliate) is apparently a “No Girlz Allowed” kind of place, too, to hear three of their top anchor/reporters tell it:
If this is what it’s like for the “girlz” at the local stations, you’ve got to wonder what it’s like at the network level. The KC Star television reporter has more.
lol – mccain took kansas state 57% – to obama’s 41%… go figure..
more of that traditional value thang.
well .. i’m sorry about no gurlz allowed [aloud? :)] but at least lil’ sweet miss sarah sue disappeared for one day … sheesh ..
Those Girlz got to learn the super secret handshake.
What about Sarah on everyday shows? Everyone’s dizzy right now and they’re afraid!!
For women doing actual news, you come to the blogs.
Yes Ma’am!
At least Ahrnold isn’t calling the state legislators “girlie-men” right now. Somebody ought to ask Ahrnold if he isn’t ashamed to be part of the scheme to remove democratic governors through hoax, fraud and corrupt dept of justice. Things are looking pretty bad right now in California, way worse than they were when Enron had Gray Davis by the balls.
Ahrnold was elected after the recall on his promise to do away with the “car tax.” But Ahr-nold has a whole host of regressive tax ideas on the table- new sales tax, new car registration taxes and he wants California state employees to give up 2 holidays and take days off without pay.
Yet California’s biggest problem right now is water. There isn’t enough of it to go around, and we are probably going to have mandatory cutbacks. Local growers worked out a deal years ago where they got lower rates in return for agreeing to large cutbacks in their water if the situation got dire. It is dire. Almost all local growers cut back production substantially. Some quit.
My water bill is twice as much as my G&E bill. That is due to 2 things: 1) those energy deals Gray Davis signed turned out to be pretty good deal the last few years and 2) in tough times my local govt hikes the water bill. Most of it isn’t even for water consumption. It is for “capacity charges” and anything else then can think of to add on. At the same time they are planning new staged water cutbacks. My garden and the local golf courses will get cut off at the same time.
Sorry for going partly OT and ranting about Ahr-nold. But the fiscal crisis in California is partly his fault for promising to cut that car-tax just to get himself in power.
After talking with friends in CA, who are terrified about fires in neighborhoods near them today, I think Ahnald is political toast. The friends are not… Obama voters, but I gather they view Ahnald as culpable for many of the cuts to local fire and police departments.
Not a good time to be Ahnald.
But methinks Karma’s making sure that Gov. Hummer gets some cosmic reckoning.
Sending good thoughts to freep, randiego, and other So Cal commenters — hope that all of you and yours are safe and well.
You know, you are right about teh governator due to the pandering on the car tax crap. It is the intellectual dishonesty that gets in my craw about him. As you would likely know far better than I, Cal has been a clusterfuck since Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13 and then the locked in mandates they keep banging into as a result of their insane other ballot propositions, including the one requiring elevated vote for taxation. Until you guys change all that back to some normalcy, I don’t see how anyone is going to make it work from the governor’s chair.
I question whether its accurate to attack Governor Schwartzennegger for intellectual dishonesty.
Not that it’s shameless, or indeed in any way unjust, lacking in merit or value, or in the least unfair; it’s just that I cannot recall a single instance in which he ever implied, let alone claimed, that his qualifications for office included anything remotely having to do with intelligence.
Nonetheless, I am prepared to accept as accurate a fairly wide range of other sorts of dishonest, including fundamental, indecent, feral, and even reflexive.
But “intellectual, well, one has to draw the line somewhere.
Point taken there.
Prop 13 is enormously popular in California. I voted against it because I did not think it was fair. Owners of identical houses on my street could be paying as little as $300 or as much as $5,000 in property taxes. We moved into our house in 1976 and have benefitted enormously from Prop 13. Now that we are retired, I can see where creeping property taxes can drive someone out of their home. I still don’t think Prop 13 is fair, especially because business properties are not technically “sold” to new owners when they actually are sold to new owners. Many business properties are not reassessed at the purchase price and that leaves residential property owners paying a disproportionate share since Prop 13.
Californians really like their propositions. They are not too swift about all the ways they can be manipulated by a wealthy individual or industry. Maybe it satisfies the “libertarian” in people. Who knows, without it many Californians might form a CIP (Californian Independence Party). I have friends who rail about taxes but regularly go to casinos where they blow $300-$500 at a time. They consider it entertainment. If the government could figure out a way to have people go blow their whole tax allotment at a casino, I think there might be less complaining.
readerOfTeaLeaves, we are ok in San Diego right now. No major fires are burning in San Diego county although this morning I woke up to the smell of smoke. I think it is drifting down from Orange County.
Glad y’all are okay. Be nice to read freep’s cheery keystrokes again. And randiego’s.
And I see bmaz is as wicked as ever, so that part of the world remains unchanged. Whew ;-))
Where has Freep been?
And what is this wicked you speak of? Blasphemy! Blasphemy!
We need a bigger legislature. The assembly has 80 members and the senate 40 – it’s easy for a few people to hold up the works. There are six or eight GOoPers who won’t vote yes on anything that raises taxes, and won’t vote no on anything that cuts them, regardless of how important it is that they vote the other way. (McClintock is one of them.)
Ahnold hasn’t watched enough of Clint Eastwoods spaghetti westerns and Dirty Harry cop movies. If he had he’d know “a man has got to know his limitations”. Or, maybe he should remember the old Chinese proverb to “be careful what you wish for”. He apparently thought (and was told) that most of being governor was just looking good and pretending to be a tough guy by calling people names like “girlie men”.
Doesn’t seem to have worked.
I can’t resist this…Dick Cavette said in his NYTimes comment that palin doesn’t seem to have a first language….Maybe that’s why she’s not on a ‘talk’ show…
Also reports from the republican govenors’ conference say that palin was not given any committee responsibilities of offices. She was also told not to talk about 2012, just 2010….
So she can’t talk and has nothing to say….LOL…
That should read ‘responsibilities or offices’
On the larger theme, I would very much enjoy seeing the Dems call the Wingers on their current “Fairness Doctrine” fund raiser, but bringing in base percentages aimed at ensuring the conservative goals preserving the viabilities of the historical two-party system and the historical acknowledgment of a two-gender social structure. With the current diminished prospects of the Republican party, and with the increasing dominance of big smarties like emptywheel and digby and mcjoan, and corporate bigwigs like Jane and Arianna and Joan Walsh, and the ominous rise of Rachel Maddow on cable, I think it’s important that the proper legal and regulatory framework be put in place now to ensure the Republicans a minimum number of seats allocated to pols around the Sunday go to yakkin tables, and equally that men receive the same assurance. Nothing to crazy, say 40 per cent.
Of course, to get this vital insurance of our heritage through Congress without it being attacked and maybe shot to pieces as ‘radical’, I think it would be shrewd to provide a similar assurance to the opposing dominant forces, in this case Democrats and women. It’s a sop of course, but anything to maintain the Founders’ national vision.
T. Boone Pickens? Have we forgotten that this man was a big Swift Boater in 2004, and that he lost a bet last spring challenging anyone to prove that Kerry hadn’t lied about his war record (refusing to pay it off when he lost)?
He wants us to forget this. How badly? Badly enough to renounce (or denounce) the swiftboating of Barak Obama, and to grab t.v. time wherever available to tout his energy proposals.
The perfect guest for a Sunday morning talk show!
Speaking of Swift Boaters, was Harold Simmons’ Montecito estate burned to the ground by the “Tea Fire”? Is there justice in this vale of tears?
The Pickens’ is all about gas and wind.
The problem with producing more natural gas domestically to replace the Middle East’s light crude and Canada’s heavy tar derivatives is that the amount of additional drilling involved poses disaster for our fresh water sources, which are already in a hell of state.
The problems with wind power are, well, a lot of them are still emerging, but the best known one is there’s no currently reliable storage technology, and no transport system at all – and if we get on it now it’ll take the better part of a decade or more to deal with just the last two.
T. Boone was domestic oil bandit until there was no more domestic oil, and he has no great pull in the Mid East & Canadian oil sands plays, or any other such as Venezuela, Brazil and central Africa. So now he’s a domestic natural gas and wind power bandit.
Terrific comment, thank you.
Actually, there are some very promising wind projects in my state (WA).
Sample info:
http://www.efsec.wa.gov/kittitaswind.shtml
http://www.xconomy.com/seattle…..-turbines/
And of more than passing interest, a long time friend was telling me about the fact that in her rural city, a business that makes wind turbines is cutting $900,000 in payroll A MONTH. I don’t even know how to describe what that means to a little city that hasn’t had even $250,000/month payroll in over 20 years.
And what’s even more surprising to me, the rural (ornery, cranky, hate-change) folks that I’d expected to be raising hell and up-in-arms about wind turbines impeding their views seem to be quite taken with them. They’re still able to hunt elk in some of the regions set aside for wind generation.
Not that any of the (male) guests booked onto the Beltway Sunday Showz would know any of what I just wrote here…. (sigh).
Wonder what Sen Maria Cantwell might have to say about these issues, if they ever let her on? She spent a ton of energy trying to get FERC to insist that Enron stop pressing Washington electrical utilities on for money on (corrupt) contracts signed when Enron manipulated the markets, and as a result, one presumes that Sen Cantwell knows a thing or two about energy issues.
But then, she’s a girl.
And now girlz are aloud.
Grrrrrr………….!!
**Sorry, was interrupted.
Girlz Interrupted
Thanks ew.
digg
This week they might have asked HRC, or Valerie Jarrett, or Sheila Bair or … OK you noticed a problem. Until you have a solution, or a path forward to a solution, what you have is a problem. I’m not saying it’s not a problem, but are you advocating an Affirmative Action programme for the Sunday morning punditcherries? How about a Thursday posting on Women for the Weekend, to provide the networks with recommendations for women of relevance to the news of the week? Is that too patronizing? Is FDL the appropriate forum for this, or maybe feministing?
What is your goal?
If California tries to dissolve marriages contracts after they’ve worked so hard to protect financial contracts such as bad mortgages which threaten the entire country, then they’re idiots, morons, hypocrites, etc.