Our guest colloquists are Boy Gonzo Jason Mattera and “Bono”, a purported member of a popular music group. Before enjoying the exchange, please note the following update posted on Glenn Beck’s Blaze website:

Editor’s note: The original Breitbart.com story has been removed and the Jason Mattera videos have now been moved to “private” on YouTube. There is widespread discussion on Twitter that the person Mattera interviewed in the videos may have been a Bono impersonator.

We now join our Youthful Muckraking Hero and Not Bono, already in progress.

Mattera: By dodging taxes on royalties are you raiding the poverty programs you purport to champion?

Bono: No.

Mattera: No? Don’t you want governments to be generous with other people’s money and not yours?

Bono: I don’t have control over that…

Mattera: How do you not have control over that? It’s your company. Are you not in charge of your own company?

Bono: It’s not my company.

Read more »

So, what’s happening today at the Washington Post?

Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.

Wow. Ever. Like. Wow.

Now, before you trot out your favorite Blazing Saddles references, let’s have a look at the rumors behind the news:

For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever.

Well, you can’t dispute the numb—

Wait. The highest for any president’s third year in office. Or, if you’d like that in bold, “The highest for any president’s third year in office.”

Can we break that down? Has Obama also set the polarization record for any president’s 857th day in office? Ever? Because that would be, y’know, historic.

Read more »

[RedState, via @anamariecox]

[Twitter]

PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: “Introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies… The Democratic attack about ‘ending Medicare’ was a pervasive line in 2011 that preyed on seniors’ worries about whether they could afford health care.” [via Political Wire]

When the Dominique Strauss-Kahn story broke it seemed to embody many of our most potent national narratives: race; class; sex; European degeneracy bested by Puritan virtue.

What if none of that was true? Or what if that narrative was secondary to another that is much more complex and startling?

Edward Jay Epstein suggests that other narrative in the New York Review of Books.

“Some people have mistakenly said this guy Kony is a Christian, and I want to make sure everyone knows he officially was disavowed by the Catholic Church in Uganda.” —James Inhofe, calling out Rush Limbaugh on the Senate floor for saying that Obama opposes the “Lord’s Resistance Army” because they’re Christian. [Media Matters]