Hank Green Says It’s Not OK for the Mainstream Media to Snipe at YouTube Stars

Bethany Mota's post-interview selfie
Bethany Mota’s post-interview selfie

If you missed it in the post-game coverage of the recent State of the Union speech, Pres. Obama broke new ground beyond perfecting presidential ad libs. He also agreed to one-on-one interviews with three YouTube stars, and one of them, Hank Green, isn’t happy with the way the “legacy” press corps treated the endeavor. Green’s article, posted on Medium, is titled “Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President.” It might have been better named, “Holy Shit, the Mainstream Media is Killing Democracy.”

Green: How does a democracy function with no credible system for informing its citizens?

CNN intro’d and outro’d every segment with Glozell [Green] in a bathtub full of cereal, as did ABC’s morning show…Even new media companies like Vice were dismissive:

“Think of it as a teeny-bopper AMA…The interviewers will be GloZell Green, who’s perhaps best known for sitting in a tub full of cereal; a 19-year-old who gives beauty advice named Bethany Mota; and Hank Green, a notorious YouTube ranter whose brother wrote The Fault in Our Stars.”

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In Which Jon Stewart Discovers That the Koch Brothers Have Taken Out Ads on His Show

screenshot-stewart-koch-industries

The billionaire Koch brothers have been running feel-good, folksy image ads about their company, Koch Industries, the nation’s second largest privately held corporation, on liberal outlets, particularly MSNBC and now on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” on Comedy Central.

Stewart fired back with a parody of the brothers’ ad on his show this week. “Clearly,” Stewart said, “the Koch brothers are trying to say to our audience of not yet dying-off voters: ‘Even though you may have heard certain things about the Koch brothers, how bad could they be? I mean, if they were evil, would a baby agree to appear in one of their advertisements?’”

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Stewart: Christie Gives N.J. Corruption a Bad Name

As a guy who grew up in New Jersey, I’m disappointed, ashamed of the state I grew up in. Political payback through traffic congestion? To see New Jersey sink to such a piss-poor, third-rate quality of corruption …. This is New Jersey! A state renowned for its piss-rich, first-rate corruption.

— Jon Stewart, not surprisingly, leading off the Daily Show last night with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

Tea Baggers Claim to Love the Constitution – So How Can They Ignore It When It Gets in the Way of Their Anti-Obama Obsession?

I thought tea partyists were supposed to revere the Constitution. The Constitution lays out two ways to undo a law — repeal it through legislation or challenge it in court. Republicans have tried both routes — 42 repeals and lawsuits all the way up to SCOTUS — and it has all failed. What they’re doing now, threatening to shut down the govt and/or ruin the full faith and credit of the United States if the president refuses to submit to their demands, is not only a thuggish act of desperation, it is an affront to the constitution.

What’s worse, of course, is that they have been plotting the government shutdown since 2009, as Rachel Maddow reported last night. Not unlike their obsession with invading Iraq in 2003, they were determined to do it at any cost, all they needed was a pretext. Then it was 9/11; now it’s opening day for the Affordable Care Act.