Tag: framing

Your Liberal Media

The Headline:

Democrats Retain Edge in Campaign Spending

The Democrat’s Paragraph (emphasis added):

Even with a recent surge in fund-raising for Republican candidates, Democratic candidates have outraised their opponents over all by more than 30 percent in the 109 House races The New York Times has identified as in play. And Democratic candidates have significantly outspent their Republican counterparts over the last few months in those contests, $119 million to $79 million.

The Kicker (emphasis added):

Republican-leaning third-party groups, however, many of them financed by large, unrestricted donations that are not publicly disclosed, have swarmed into the breach, pouring more than $60 million into competitive races since July, about 80 percent more than the Democratic-leaning groups have reported spending.

See what they did there? By making a false equivalency, we can say the Democrat is wildly outspending the GOP when judged by individual candidate spending. But, of course, if you count in all the outside group spending, well, then, that uh, that tells a slightly different story. In fact, assuming these numbers are correct, the GOP is outspending The Democrat. One might even headline it:

GOP and Their Shadowy Enablers Outspend Democrats by Wide Margin

But that’s not important. Move along. Move along. Keep walking.

File under: graphs you will never see a Democrat use, talk about, reference, admit the existence of, or in any way shape or form build an electoral strategy around.
Quite the opposite. They’ll wholeheartedly adopt the goddamned “Pledge to America” come November 3, 2010.

And yes, I know when new members of Congress take office. I also know that President DeMint can be very impatient.

Squashed: Don’t worry about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell vote

squashed:

Today the Republican’s defeated a Democratic effort to bring a defense authorization bill to the floor that included a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Now both sides can use it as an election issue.

This did not remove the repeal from the defense authorization bill. […]
[It] is a critical bit of legislation. It will make it to the floor before the end of the year. Somebody will introduce an amendment to get the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell out of the bill. The amendment will fail. The bill will pass. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed.

It’s not so much about whether the package will squeak through (with DADT and DREAM intact), it’s about deflating the effect of said (inevitable) passage. Now it will pass post-midterms, and nobody but nobody will even know it happened.
This was never about the policy, it was about denying The Democrat a win, no matter how incremental, that might give the base even the least bit of wind in its sails. And, once again, rather than fight or force the GOP to eat a massive shit sandwich while winning the day (see: Troops, why does John McCain want them to die?), the GOP is handed this victory entirely without cost, while the democratic base sees yet more fecklessness and one more reason not to bother come November.

It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. This is why they fail.

Squashed: Don’t worry about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell vote

here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free “objectivity” is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones. Just look at the things that are allowed. The Washington Post lavished editorial praise on the brutal, right-wing tyrant Augusto Pinochet, and that caused no controversy. AP’s Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier got caught sending secret, supportive emails to Karl Rove, and nothing happened. Benjamin Netanyahu formally celebrates the Terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 civilians and nobody is stigmatized for supporting him. Erick Erickson sent around the most rancid and arguably racist tweets, only to thereafter be hired as a CNN contributor. […] Having someone who was part of the slaughter of 80 civilians in Lebanon on your Board is fine. [Having] a former AIPAC official with an obvious bias toward Israel […] is perfectly consistent with a news network’s “credibility.” But expressing sadness over the death of an Islamic cleric beloved by much of the Muslim world is not. Whatever is driving that, it has nothing to do with “objectivity.”

Glenn Greenwald, opining on the inexplicable firing of CNN’s Octavia Nasr. Read the whole thing. Your Liberal Media.

BP’s Oyster

According to the New York Times, the oldest oyster-shucking operation in the country shucked its last oyster on Thursday. Towards the end of the piece is this quote from the requisite owner/operator:

We were just hopeful they would have capped that thing by now [such that we wouldn’t be forced to shutter the business]

Uh, even if they had completely and forever capped it yesterday, your business model (harvesting food products from the gulf) is over. Probably for decades. Remains unclear to me why the media, so obsessed with idiotic minutiae, utterly fails to comprehend The Big Picture. All these gulf-based industries except oil are going away. And in terms of those living on the Earth today, they are likely going away forever. Oh, right, “obsessed with idiotic minutiae.”

MSM: If you want a guvmint-should-be-doing-more story, how’s about the guvmint should be actively retraining these folks, starting now for some sort of useful job that they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, because shrimping, shucking oysters, and the various other food-related gulf industries are over. Forever. It’s just that the media, and by extension America, doesn’t seem to grasp this yet.

Just so we’re clear, in the 21st century, Republican gubernatorial candidates are attacked for accepting modern biology and being only a partial Biblical literalist.

Steve Benen. Why yes, Steve, yes they are. Nothing to see here.

My sweet untouched Miranda

It occurs to me that people like Joementum, the Commonwealth’s own Code Brown, and apparently all of those in the media that slavishly cover them simply don’t understand what the Miranda warning even is.

Here’s what it’s not: conferring you any new rights

Here’s what it is: warning you of the rights you hold, by dint of being a living citizen of these United States and of which you may or may not choose to avail yourself (specifically, this boils down to the right to sit there mute unless and until you’ve spoken to counsel). Beginning to see why they so frequently put that word “warning” in there after the word Miranda?

How is it that these same folks that recite and (incorrectly) parse the Second Amendment ad nauseum (but inevitably, and notably verbatim) don’t understand the most basic concepts regarding what I would deem the single most fundamental right governing our interactions with our pre- and post-W.Bush-administration government?
Ironically, though, does it surprise anyone that gun ownership also happens to be the one Constitutional right that suspected terrorists get to keep under the GOP’s dream setup. Honestly, we should probably make it even easier for the suspected terrorist to buy guns; I’d assume this policy is best achieved through a wide-ranging program of blanket tax cuts.

So, once again for the truly slow and Brian Williams: Mirandizing someone simply ensures that they are fully aware of rights that are operative for all citizens no matter what; it doesn’t confer said rights, and neither do those rights magically begin only subsequent to their being invoked by rote recitation. Just like on all the cop shows!

Playing into their hands

The fecklessness of the Democrat never ceases to amaze. Ezra Klein notes that

Pages 8 through 18 [of the Democratic Proposal on Immigration Reform] are devoted to “ending illegal employment through biometric employment verification.”

Look, the merits of this sort of thing are totally beside the point. Please recall: the facts do not matter. You’ve got the right wing epistemic loop working overtime on every manner of perceived plot, up to and including forced implantation of identifying microchips. The fact that GOPers are themselves (and themselves alone) proposing the forced implantation of microchips…into immigrants? Beside the point. (The facts do not matter) Here we have the death panels, and they’re about to track each and every man woman and child in these United States.

This gift on the part of the Democrat only serves to confirm the wildest fears of the far-right conspiracy nuts, whilst also giving ample cover for your garden variety, non-far-right pol to speak in whistle-tongue about this sort of utter lunacy, thus sweeping up the merely right wing along with the birthers and the rest of the lunatic fringe into one neat package. Apparently it’s considered a shrill move to try to splinter that particular block.

Expect plenty of “definitive proof that Obama is the antichrist” rhetoric as soon as this hits the fan. Maybe even on the floor of the House and/or Senate. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.