While walking back from the grocery last Saturday, I happened to have my walkman on and happened to have it tuned to the NPR station (nowadays with commercial radio it's either the sports talk channel or National Public Radio - - the rest suck). The program "Planet Money" was on and they were tracking down how the current financial crisis that plagues the United States could have occurred. After listening to the one hour program, I was stunned, particularly by two things.

First off, a transcript of part of the program can be viewed here
[link]

Only the United States Congress, in conjunction with the Executive Branch, could have conceived something as monumentally stupid as the Office of Thrift Supervision. To empower a regulatory agency and then to fail to fund it? Instead, to make them dependent for funding from the very institutions they were charged with regulating? And then to have the utter gall to wonder why this agency didn't regulate them? It's been said that "Capitalism has only one flaw: Capitalists". I'd extend that to "Government has only one flaw: Those who govern".

But the second thing that struck me was how, in one short hour, I'd learned more from this program than I had from the rest of the news media, foreign and domestic, in six months. And it pointed out yet again how superficial, how ratings-driven, how agenda-based, and how corporate media news reporting is today, both in print and on the air.

And people wonder why I get my news from The Daily Show. Hell, it's just as superficial and agenda-driven, but at least they make me laugh.