Gimme an O....Gimme a B...

They call themselves a news magazine...still! They supposedly report on events in depth. They label advertisements and they identify editorials, supposedly. The features though are NEWS. Which used to mean objective observations of current events.

Take this staid and sober evaluation of policy:

Yes, the stimulus has cut taxes for 95% of working Americans, bailed out every state, hustled record amounts of unemployment benefits and other aid to struggling families and funded more than 100,000 projects to upgrade roads, subways, schools, airports, military bases and much more.

That sure reads like a campaign speech that screams for fact-checking.

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet.

Golly gee, Mr. Wizard, how do we get "renewable power from the earth"? Do we re-heat geo-thermal? And what kind of factories manufacture "green stuff"? Is that like the goo they pour on people in that old game-show? And gimme a large box of "far-out energy research..." whatever that is.

Critics have complained that while the New Deal left behind iconic monuments — courthouses, parks, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Grand Coulee Dam — this New New Deal will leave a mundane legacy of sewage plants, repaved roads, bus repairs and caulked windows. In fact, it will create new icons too: solar arrays, zero-energy border stations, an eco-friendly Coast Guard headquarters, an "advanced synchrotron light source" in a New York lab. But its main legacy will be change.

So, FDR built the Lincoln Tunnel and Grand Coulee Dam and things like that. I think I understand the "zero-energy border station" as a manifestation of immigration policy already in place. I guess an "eco-friendly Coast Guard Hq" would be a military building that said "hello" back to you when you work late at night or maybe one that didn't generate tons of bureaucratic CYA paperwork and PowerPoint presentations. I've got to question the "advanced synchrotron". Wasn't the current synchrotron good enough?

And, still in character the main legacy will be change! Yes indeed, we've just bought $785 billion dollars worth of change.

Read the whole disgusting pandering piece of political propaganda and then swear off Time magazine forever:

How the Stimulus is Changing America or "Hail to the Chief"

This is a fantasy land! It's a drug dream gone overboard. Something has to change soon.