A slow news day, on the cusp of the official Dog Days, but hey — that just makes it a challenge:
- Syria army steps up Aleppo attack (BBC) — One part of the world that does not have “slow news days.” You might also be interested to read this NPR story, Is Assad Carving Out A Haven For Syria’s Alawites? And this from The Guardian: Al-Qaida turns tide in battle for eastern Syria.
- Aurora Suspect Charged With 24 Counts Of Murder (NPR) — And 116 cases of attempted murder. You didn’t have to be hit for it to be attempted murder, of course.
- Insurance Rebates Seen as Selling Point for Health Law (NYT) — Hey, did you get yours? Mine was just under $100. Doesn’t affect what I think of Obamacare, though.
- Romney’s remark creates new stir on overseas trip (WashPost) — Fresh from insulting the Brits, he ticks off the Palestinians.
- Three people in Midlands have tested positive for West Nile virus (thestate.com) — This is obviously a very serious situation, since all three cases were middle-aged men!
- Anti-Putin Punk Band Pleads Not Guilty (WSJ) — I just thought this had a lot of man-bites-dog elements. Or rather, punk-girl-bites-Putin elements. Including the fact that it’s the most prominent story on WSJ at the moment, which is an additional irony. Here’s a picture of the girls.
Then, of course, there’s the Olympics. An American won gold today. But I figure you know that’s going on…
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On the West Nile, who do you think is cutting the grass? Hope they are OK. I got some major huge Beartooth Mtns. bites from mosquitos last week. Still bothering me.
Bugs. Yuck.
Maybe Gov. Romney’s plan for improving the economy is to start a war?
With all the Haley bashing that you do, I’m surprised you didn’t write about her unemployment bill she signed today.
Shut your mouth, Karen. Don’t give him any ideas!
In a related gaff (see number 4) Romney said this about the Israeli healthcare system:
“Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? 8 percent. You spend 8 percent of GDP on health care. And you’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our GDP on health care. 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, let me compare that with the size of our military. Our military budget is 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of GDP. We have to find ways, not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to finally manage our health care costs.”
In response Salon noted the following:
“Mitt’s not wrong. He’s just flabbergastingly off-message. The Post’s Sarah Kliff does the heavy lifting:
Israel regulates its health care system aggressively, requiring all residents to carry insurance and capping revenue for various parts of the country’s health care system. Israel created a national health care system in 1995, largely funded through payroll and general tax revenue. The government provides all citizens with health insurance: They get to pick from one of four competing, nonprofit plans. Those insurance plans have to accept all customers—including people with pre-existing conditions—and provide residents with a broad set of government-mandated benefits.”
Basically Romney is praising socialized healthcare. Stunning isn’t it. Perhaps even more stunning the press is giving this HUGE gaff very little attention.
Kathryn and Karen:
Just as there was great continuity between the previous and current administrations, a president Mitt is more likely to get those ideas from the current White House than from Karen. 🙁
What job producers think of Obamacare:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/30/company-decision-to-nix-expansion-over-obamacare-tax-renews-pressure-on/?intcmp=trending
Seems to me that this administration is ending wars, not starting them.
SD II come on. You can do better than Fox Noise. Those who watch Fox are less informed than those who don’t according to proven research.
Yes, Faux News.
The State had an earth shattering hede that Fox News and MSNBC viewers see the world differently. Dog bites man much?
Not to nitpik but I thought only 12 people died in Aurora. So why 24 counts of murder? Either way he’ll never see the light of day. I’d hate to be his lawyer. Maybe Juan can recommend someone good.
It was a weak headline, but not that weak. What it said was, watchers of Fox and MSNBC “live in different worlds.” That’s different.
The idea being that they don’t merely look at the same facts in different ways, but their facts, the worlds they experience, are different. That is to say, the same facts are described in completely different terms. This creates separate realities, as Carlos Castaneda would have it.
This is as opposed to the community-forming media forms that Americans became used to in the latter half of the 20th century, which made it more possible to come to consensus on issues, because everyone was operating on the same set of facts. They might have disagreed strongly over what to do about those facts, but the facts being the same ones made it easier to come to SOME sort of agreement.
There’s nothing profound or surprising about that, of course, because it’s been said many times.
I guess the folks at The State decided to use this McClatchy series because they anticipated this being a slow news week.
What the teaser for this story yesterday made ME think was, What does it say about you politically if you don’t watch any of it? Because that’s me.
Bud,
Try this link to Jeralyn who is an experienced defense attorney in Denver.
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2012/7/30/125832/626
Bud,
They doubled the number because they are charging him with both first degree homicide, and depraved indifference homicide for each of the dead, each are capital crimes. Similar charges for those wounded.
“They might have disagreed strongly over what to do about those facts, but the facts being the same ones made it easier to come to SOME sort of agreement.”
When was this period of harmony? Pre-Vietnam? Pre-Row-v-Wade? Pre-Ronald Reagan? Pre-Clinton?
What were some of the agreements that were made based on the facts?
@J – Would the Indianapolis Business Journal be better?
Scroll down to Cook Medical.
http://www.ibj.com/company-news/PARAMS/article/35813
Brad, Doug is right here; the world as we remember it probably never did exist. Just take a look at Vietnam or the Civil Rights struggle. People fought bitter struggles to end the Vietnam war and to improve the civil rights of people with color.
Pro-war people saw the Soviet Union as a huge threat to the existence of democracy and if they were allowed to succeed in Vietnam then the dominos would fall. Their “facts” were that communism was a threat in and of itself. They didn’t regard that as an opinion, it was, to them, established fact.
On the other hand the anti-war folks saw this a American Imperialism. To them the “facts” were we were occupying a sovereign nation in an aggressive way and that the pro-war folks were just using the communist threat as an excuse to expand American control through military means.
Both groups of people saw the “facts” very differently. (Of course the anti-war people were right). So what lesson can we learn from that? Simply that sometimes you have to push hard to make sure your set of “facts” becomes established policy.
Y’all are both missing the point.
This is about media and their impact on society.
Once, there was THE newspaper in a community and there were THREE networks and their affiliates, and there was an agreed-upon ethos of being completely “objective” and noncommittal — both because it was seen as right, and because it was a good business strategy (get EVERYONE to read you, regardless of their political attitudes).
This was not the way things always were, but a brief moment in American history, of a generation or two. American journalism was founded in extreme partisanship and advocacy. The State was founded in order to fight the Tillman machine, for instance (which got the first editor killed).
But toward the middle of the last century, that was shoved aside in favor of a kind of bland sameness that was better for business, and more fitting of a monopoly.
The explosion of media outlets changed that, and enabled people to shop for the news media that told them what they wanted to hear. This had its roots in the anti-“liberal media” baiting by Spiro Agnew in the behalf of the Nixon administration (and of course, there were even deeper roots than that for ol’ you-won’t-have-dick-nixon-to-kick-around-any-more), and various anti-intellectual and anti-elitist strains in American life.
But as the potential for a larger number of media developed, conservatives created their own, overtly rightist, media, while liberals turned to new outlets that really WERE what the conservatives had imagined the MSM to be — overtly, unabashedly “liberal.”
And so, we no longer merely strongly disagreed what to think of the facts. We had different media to color the facts for us differently. That greatly exacerbated the existing tendency toward polarization.
This isn’t a controversial thing I’m saying, guys. It’s kind of a Modern Media 101 sort of principle. Which is why the headline in The State today was a bit trite…
Exactly how did this alleged monopolistic media dogma serve to make things better? Doug was merely pointing out something that I agree is a truth. Simply that this picture of a simpler and better time long ago just never really did exist. And that’s especially true in politics.
They might have disagreed strongly over what to do about those facts, but the facts being the same ones made it easier to come to SOME sort of agreement.
-Brad
This statement is just flat out false. We absolutely did NOT have agreement on many issues, especially Vietnam and Civil Rights. What happened was one side controlled congress and the presidency and they got their way on the issues. By 1968 Vietnam was about as far from concensus agreement as any issue in my lifetime.
One last point. While I believe it is true that certain issues in the 60s were just as polarizing as anything today I don’t think it was necessarily based on political party. There were many pro-war Democrats and a fair number of anti-war Republicans in the late 60s.
Bud, you’re not paying attention to what I’m saying.
But since you want to talk about something completely different, I’ll bite…
We absolutely DID have consensus on many issues, including Vietnam and Civil Rights.
You may or may not recall the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And if you go over to this other post, you’ll note that a subtext of what Atwater was saying was that the consensus of what sorts of attitudes on race were acceptable and which were not shifted dramatically in a generation. We went VERY rapidly as a society from one in which racial prejudice was accepted to the point that it was necessary to disguise it because it was NOT acceptable. The Acts I mention above were sort of the high water marks of that change.
As for Vietnam, it took several years for the dissident antiwar view to come anywhere near the mainstream. It totally shocked the Democratic Party when McCarthy got traction running against the war presided over by a president of his own party in1968. That caused RFK to jump in late, and LBJ to drop out. From then on, the Democratic Party became increasingly the antiwar party, but it was not that previously. And if you’re recall, it was NOT one of those dissident candidates who won the nomination (although RFK probably could have). It was LBJ’s veep.
The trauma that that debate caused in the Democratic Party was something that Nixon turned to his advantage in appealing to his “Silent Majority,” which still did not oppose the war — in other words, who were still where the gravitational center of the Democratic Party had been only a short while before.
That, of course, was the beginning of the really deep polarization that would come later, as the post-WWII, and later post-draft, generations came to power.
The kind of broad sense that “we’re all in this together” that characterized the leadership that came along in the late 40s, through the 50s and well into the 60s, which gave us the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan, desegregation, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, plus LBJ’s Great Society programs, began unraveling as the consensus over Vietnam flew apart. And then, due to many other factors, the sides grew apart at an accelerating pace.
Sorry Brad, you’re just wrong on this. And shockingly so. In the beginning maybe there was a general concensus about Vietnam (but by no means unaninimoty) but by 1967 there was clearly a very sharp divide in the country. And that shakey early concensus was based on an American president lying to the American people. The anti-war folks were gaining traction and no amount of news monopoly was going to stem the tide. Indeed even the media monopoly was breaking apart. McCarthy may not have succeeded but he was a very powerful force by the summer of 1968. It’s utterly ridiculous to suggest there was “concensus” by then. One side would prevail and the other would lose.
For a while that was the pro-war folks. Ultimately the anti-war folks succeeded and it was apparent that popular support no longer existed for the war.
By 1972 McGovern’s anti-war populism was no longer necessary to bring an end to America’s involvement. Even Nixon recognized the war was politically unsustainable. At that time there was pretty much a concensus against the war. But between 1967 and 1971 the nation was sharply divided.
The moral to this story is that popular movements can grow and succeed if they are on the right side of an issue. Clearly the proper course of action was always to leave Vietnam. Thanks to the heros in the anti-war movement that concensus was finally achieved. Too bad it took so long.
Speaking of civil rights, did you see the article in The State about the dilapidated old dime store that was torn down in Columbia on Friday (http://www.thestate.com/2012/07/31/2376096/historic-civil-rights-site-is.html#.UBg5aaPheGU)? And now we have people crying because this condemned fire trap of a crack house was torn down instead of wasting taxpayer money to have it restored? If people are so gung-ho about this, where were they when the roof started leaking or when then windows were first busted? As long as it’s someone else’s money money is no object.
SD II, Many Thanks for the link!
Was McCarthyism a byproduct of having a narrow media channel?
I think the media is most powerful when it breaks away from the filtered version of the facts.
Or were we a better country when the media turned a blind eye to JFK’s affairs while in office as compared to the press in the Clinton years?
The supposed power of media outlets like Fox and MSNBC is greatly overrated by people in the media. The ratings for those channels minimal and the demographics are basically “old and white”. The highest rated primetime show on Fox, O’Reilly, gets about 1.1 million viewers age 35-64 per night… out of about 2.8 million total. So the majority of people watching these shows are already retired or perhaps unable to figure out how to use a remote in the nursing home. That 2.8 million number is less than 1% of Americans. And those numbers pretty much equal all the rest of the cable news channels combined for the same time slot.
So 2% of Americans spend their evenings getting duped by Fox and MSNBC. The rest of us can pretty much figure things out for ourselves…. or not.
But you would think Fox reaches most of the homes in America and is a major influence on politics based on the open warfare against the network. Then, you have the anti-MSNBC crowd who think the same thing about Ed Schultz and Maddow. Guess some must have a strawman to pound away on to relieve their frustrations. Doug is on point.
And I see that bud failed to identify the president who used the Gulf of Tonkin lie to expand the war in Vietnam. In case there may be some convenient memory loss, it was LBJ. Yet, it was Nixon who was painted with the war monger brush, not LBJ.
“Shut your mouth, Karen. Don’t give him any ideas!”…Kathryn
Same can be said about Obama. If the race gets very tight and a “little” military action would build his image and voter base, you can bet it would be considered. So far, he has been more than willing to use drones to kill members of the Taliban. Never, ever forget – in the end, Obama is still a politician, no different that all the others, Republican or Democrat.
Sorry, should have been “than”, not “that”.
@J – You would have gotten more information from the first one.
As Bill Lumbergh would say, Bart, I’m just going to have to go ahead and disagree with you, there.
LBJ took the heat from the antiwar folks more than any individual. Remember, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Nixon just inherited the mantle, along with the war.
For those who hate O’Reilly, here’s the best of Ed Schultz. And to think I knew him when he was just a lowly sports reporter who’d get fired from station to station.
Unfortunately, Bart, I fear you are all too correct and suggested that very thing at dinner here in Germany last night! More likely, Syria may be looking for a new leader, though, no?
Bart, I’ve never defended LBJ. You have me pegged wrong if you think I’m a Democratic Party partisan. What I am is a liberal. When a Democrat does something that goes against modern liberal doctraine, like lying us into war, then I am more than happy to call them on it. Sad thing is LBJ would be remembered as a great president for his domestic policies but Vietnam overshadowed that.