Tag: MSM
Wait, MTP is up for Reelection?
Man: I listen to Meet the Press and I think a lot of people in the room, we end up turning it off, because during the election season, you’re letting politicians get away with softball answers and you’re not really forcing the conversations.
David Gregory: Sir, sir, you know what, with all due respect, I don’t know which program you’re watching because every week—I’m not going to get in a debate with you—I ask about taxes, I ask about how you pay for taxes, […] And by the way sir, I’ve also dedicated the program to talking about education and about reform as well.
Man: [but, but, but]
David Gregory: No, sir, I get the last word here, you asked the question. Just because people don’t listen or don’t take action behind it is not something I can directly control.
Man: I like the fact that you ask them [these questions], but you know, when we hear the answers they seem to be soundbite answers.
David Gregory: You know what sir, you know where your recourse is—Election Day.
A Discontinuous Discussion
Mike Lee, (likely: R, Utah): Our current debt is a little shy of $14 trillion. And I don’t want it to increase 1 cent above the current debt limit and I will vote against that. [A Government shutdown is] an inconvenience, it would be frustrating to many, many people and it’s not a great thing, and yet at the same time, it’s not something that we can rule out. It may be absolutely necessary.
Alex Seitz-Wald (ThinkProgress): [Disgraced] Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s government shutdown in 1995 was disastrous; it ended up costing taxpayers over $800 million in losses for salaries paid to furloughed employees, delayed access to Medicare and Social Security, and caused a ‘[m]ajor curtailment in services,’ including health services, to veterans.
Eric Cantor (R, VA, Minority Whip): No. I don’t think the country needs or wants a shutdown. [We in the GOP] have to be careful [pursuing our agenda such that we’re not] seen as a bunch of yahoos.”
Lemkin: I wouldn’t worry about that, Cantor; that hasn’t cost you a thing yet and presupposes a MSM that, you know, gives a shit about objective reality. Mark it: government will be shut down early 2011.
Your Liberal Media
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.
Old News
Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.
Memo to all assignment editors still employed in the American media apparatus: If you posit that Wikileaks file dumps are inevitably “old news” and thus nothing worth covering, then why aren’t you asking yourself the question that clearly follows: why were those 400,000 documents of “old news” classified in the first place? Where’s an ongoing series about reflexive, pervasive classification and its poisonous impact on any ostensibly free society?
For the American Republic to operate, we ought to expect that a smallish filing cabinet will ultimately be full of the truly dangerous secrets that must be kept. Nuclear bomb designs, the plans for the invasion of Normandy beach next year, and other sensitive documents of that sort are all that should be in there. Instead, “our” government routinely classifies everything, almost certainly still including many aspects of the Normandy beach invasion of 1944. How is a citizen supposed to know anything about the operation of their government? How is a citizen supposed to understand the wages (or even benefits) of these secret decisions, carried out in secret, reported on in secret, and then bundled away inside of another secret which might, just might, show up in heavily redacted form 50 years later, only to be greeted as “old news” by a media all too eager to please its governmental “adversary.”
The answer, of course, is: they are not supposed to.
Step one in any national recovery, any reemergence of sensibility and civic attention is going to have to be: no more blanket secrecy. Period. It’s very easy to know what should be classified as secret in a democracy, and that’s almost nothing. Classification as a general tool (and an inevitable bulwark used to hide the rampant lawlessness of administrations from both parties) obfuscates the outcomes of our own often poisonous and self-defeating policies, the very ones many of us claim to hold dear (while knowing next to nothing about them), and it has got to stop.
It’s not about race. It’s also not about free speech, as some have charged. Nor is it about an alleged attempt by NPR to stifle conservative views.
NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard on firing Juan Williams. FOXnews supporters seem to have forgotten that his role was as the token liberal over there; how in the hell could his viewpoint be legitimately considered one of stifled conservatism? And NPR seems to have no idea whatsoever re: his position within their organization. Was he a conservative analyst? Apparently not. He was supposed to be a leading voice of the view from nowhere. This “explanation” only serves to make me wonder if anybody ever listened to what he said. Unbelievable.
Likewise, can we clarify for once and for all that freedom of speech applies to your freedom to state an opinion, and not freedom from the implications and outcomes of stating that opinion? One would think this goes without saying, but I have yet to see a MSM outlet reporting anything approaching a baseline understanding of this.
But, by all means, no reason to point at the Rodeo Clown.
Likewise, can we clarify for once and for all that freedom of speech applies to your freedom to state an opinion, and not freedom from the implications and outcomes of stating that opinion? One would think this goes without saying, but I have yet to see a MSM outlet reporting anything approaching a baseline understanding of this.
But, by all means, no reason to point at the Rodeo Clown.
Angle won because she looked relatively credible, appearing not to be the Wicked Witch of the West.
Jon Ralston puts yet another shiv of ignorance into our already dying state. This is the same meaningless horseshit brew of absurdly low expectations that gave us W Bush, two eternal wars, and a nearly complete economic collapse. Apparently the View from Nowhere just won’t be sated until those few of us left are all living on the riverside and trading skins with whoever floats by.
Watching Christine O’Donnell debate Chris Coons last night, we were struck by how sensible a person like O’Donnell can seem, given our brain-dead political norms, if she has been prepared in a few modest ways. O’Donnell tossed off familiar claims about “supporting big government,” “raising taxes” and “supporting the special interests” (along with a few specialized inanities about having once been a “bearded Marxist”). But our discourse has been so dumb for so long, it truly sounded, by American norms, like she was making real statements.
Bob Somerby, getting it exactly right.
You want an existential threat to Our Republic (as the GOP so frequently labels everything, large or small)? This is it. Until somebody in the media goes to work on raising the level of discourse that is allowed to pass for debates and serious discussions in this country, and then continues working on that same issue for a decade or more, we’ll be one downturn, one election, one heartbeat away from utter disaster. Nobody else can do it, and nobody but nobody in the MSM seems at all interested in taking up the cause, even for an hour a week. Oh look, a shiny penny!
You want an existential threat to Our Republic (as the GOP so frequently labels everything, large or small)? This is it. Until somebody in the media goes to work on raising the level of discourse that is allowed to pass for debates and serious discussions in this country, and then continues working on that same issue for a decade or more, we’ll be one downturn, one election, one heartbeat away from utter disaster. Nobody else can do it, and nobody but nobody in the MSM seems at all interested in taking up the cause, even for an hour a week. Oh look, a shiny penny!
Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?
…the McCain phenomenon has always baffled me. Even back in the glory days of the Straight Talk Express he seemed like a consummate phony to me, sucking up to reporters not because he was being unusually candid, but because it seemed like a good strategy to beat a well-financed guy who was running ahead of him. He’s always been nasty, he’s always been hot tempered, he’s always looked out for number one, and he’s always been willing to take whatever position was convenient at the time.
Yep. The media enjoyed the perception of total access, and thus created the myth of the maverick. As David Foster Wallace showed us (but whose text no longer appears to be online), the truth of “Bullshit 1” was always out there, they just refused to mention it. Too busy talking about Al Gore being told to wear un-American four button suits while discovering the Love Canal and then lying about these and other entirely media-created falsehoods.
Lemkin 