The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: politics

  • Yay, “Liberal” Media!

    Headline at ABC News: “Democrats are Dropping Like Flies”

    Reality:

    Not seeking reelection for

    US House

    US Senate

    Governor
    Democrats

    10

    2

    3
    Republicans

    14

    6

    4

    So the retiring Republicans outnumber the retiring Democrats in every chamber— and in what we are told is destined to be a “Republican year” — yet it’s the Democrats who are dropping like flies?

    How exactly did the myth of a liberal bias in major media ever get started??

    See Political Animal for more details.

  • What Michael Steel Won’t Let Me Post

    OK, that’s melodramatic.  All that’s occurred so far is that their mediocre site has choked several times since I’ve tried to post a comment in response to a blog post there.  The post blames President Obama for the jobs lost in the past 11 months and worries what it would mean if he does a “hard pivot” towards jobs creation in January.

    Now, it might just be that the GOP site is poorly designed (other evidence suggests this) or that they’re just slow.  And it might be that they don’t like hearing feedback from people who haven’t drunk their Kool-Aid.  In any event, after my third attempt to post, I decided to cut-and-paste my comment and post it here.  Ah, the joys of the vanity electronic press!

    I totally agree.  After all, it’s simply irrelevant that the economy inherited by the President was bleeding jobs at a rate unseen in 70 years, after his predecessor managed to follow a decade of strong growth with a decade of retrenchment, turning surpluses into deficits while squeezing the middle class and giving away trillions to the uber-rich.  And it doesn’t really matter that many private forecasters believe that the economy would be in far more dire straits absent the stimulus (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/charts_and_graphs_that_will_fi_2.html), including shedding perhaps an additional 2% of jobs if the money -hadn’t- beeen spent.

    What really counts is ideological purity, not pesky things like facts or reality.  After all, if you stay pegged to reality, you might -never- get the chance to turn a national tragedy into carte blanche to launch your own war of choice against a nation completely unaffiliated with the attackers, while ignoring the fact that 15 out of 19 of them came from the Middle Eastern country that you and your daddy were so close to.  And what would even -be- the point of being in power if you can’t shred two hundred years of judicial philosophy to pursue your own mean ends?

  • Security v. Security Theater

    Not surprisingly, Bruce Schneier has an excellent piece talking about the psychological dimensions of terrorism and what a strong, stable industrial democracy can do in the face of amorphous threats… without sacrificing its principles, its freedoms, or its citizens.

    If you live in an advanced country, you should probably read this — before the next attack and the urge for primal reactions.

  • Some PSAs on the Health Care Debate

    And, who’s looking out for the Insurance Companies?

  • Health Care Debate Quote of the Day

    Ezra Klein writes what is fast becoming my favorite go-to blog regarding the health care debate (and politics at large), and he had a truly fantastic quote about the recent Michael Steele discovery of Medicare:

    “Still, what we’re seeing here is the GOP swearing that they will protect, defend and preserve a single-payer health-care system. And this comes after months spent fighting a “government takeover” of health care. If you could hook that kind of cognitive dissonance up to a turbine, we wouldn’t need cap-and-trade.” {bold added}

    If you haven’t read Klein’s blog, give it a whirl — it’s pretty insightful with just the right dash of snark.

  • Knowing is Half the Battle

    I was cruising TechDirt and saw a neat post on “Is The Federal Government The Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?”  The idea is that the recent data.gov initiative has led to an outpouring of with-it and effective apps allowing anyone to get a handle on the vast trove of information compiled by the federal government.  If you haven’t checked out data.gov, give it a whirl — it’s pretty astounding.  After a week of hearing about ludicrous claims of “death panels” and “keeping government’s hands off my (government-run) Medicare”, it was nice to be reminded that good people working hard can produce tremendous work — that government can serve a positive purpose and isn’t intrinsically evil, corrupt, or incompetent.

    Some of the nifty apps I saw (via the techdirt link) were

    This isn’t quite the level of Star Trek (“Computer, rearrange known data into a new theory of physics”) but it’s a step in the right direction.  🙂  And if the survival of democracy requires the active participation of an educated and engaged citizenry, then cataloging what is actually known can help secure the health of our republic.  For all the noise and thunder of the 24-hour news cycle, this is where the action really is.

  • Media Idiocy

    {Edited to spell Mr. Fineman’s name correctly.}

    Here’s one reason why political discourse in this country is so messed up. I watched the Presidential press conference on MSNBC. (Normally, I would not, but the remote wasn’t working and I hit MSNBC before any of the other news channels.) I found it to be above average, with President Obama tackling important questions about the administration’s health care plan and the looming political struggles over it. The questions were not bad, surprisingly, and President Obama was his usual erudite self. I think that, while little in the way of breaking news happened, he did capture the essence of the debate and make it meaningful for the average citizens.

    Because I couldn’t switch the TV off fast enough (remember, no remote), I accidentally watched a brief exchange between Chris Matthews and his trained expert (Howard Feinman? Fineman).  Mr. Matthews led off with something like “Didn’t the president just step on his own headline with that final remark about Prof. Gates’ arrest in Cambridge?  Isn’t his taking the side of the professor going to be the story tomorrow?”  And Mr. Fineman nodded sagely and offered up the idiotic sentiment (again paraphrased), “It will dominate the discussion because it was news while little of the health care part was.”

    Get it?  A citizen who watched the press conference — someone, we might assume, who tuned in because he or she is concerned about, maybe even a bit worried about about the state of their health care and the future of their family’s health treament — watched the President expound for 50 minutes in a solid, understandable way … this same citizen will apparently forget all of that and be seduced by the flash of a (notably pedestrian) discussion of the role of race in America.  Apparently that wipes out everything that went before, even though the citizen just spent an hour hearing it.

    Of course, that’s just stupid.  Anyone who watched the conference will walk away thinking about health care.  Of course, very many Americans did not watch the conference.  More than likely, Messrs. Matthews and Fineman are correct:  Those Americans will mostly discuss the race question.  Why?  Because the media — including Matthews and Fineman — will spend the next few days telling America that the race question was the important part!  Why will that message be pushed?  Because it’s “self-evident” that it will be.  And my main anger flows towards the media pinheads (such as Matthews and Fineman) who will bemoan the circus and will complain that President Obama blew his opportunity, without even once noticing that the circus results from the actions of the clowns … that is, the very same media pinheads.

    Political discourse is dying in thie country — indeed, if health care reform stalls, actual Americans will be dying in this country — because we have a media establishment that incentives flash and sizzle over substance and which actively discourages paying attention to serious issues by offering up tempests in teapots.

  • “We are not a people who fear the future. We are a people who make it.”

    In general, I’m not overly impressed with the Presidential Saturday radio address (now of course really a YouTube address).  But I liked today‘s, probably because it resonates with something I’ve said before (twice, even).

    Happy Birthday, America.

  • Lunacon 2009 (1): Friday

    Well, Lunacon is officially underway. So far I’ve tried out a new card game (Fluxx) and attended one session (“Those Terrible Middle Ages”). I’ve also discovered that I can walk out my room (418), down two corridors, around a bend, and directly onto the 7th floor. It’s no accident they call the Hilton Rye Town “the hotel that Escher built”.
    (more…)

  • A Picture Worth 800 Billion Dollars

    In case somehow you think all the talk of “an economy in free fall” is somehow just hyperbole:

    An economy in free fall: Weve already lost far more jobs than typical and the bottom is not in sight.
    An economy in free fall: We've already lost far more jobs than typical and the bottom is not in sight.

    This graphic, printed at Swampland, makes clear: We are already in deep trouble. The current stimulus bill is, in anything, too small. Under circumstances like these, rapid and massive spending by the government is the only thing that has ever been shown to have an ameliorative impact.