A senior editor at Fortune magazine actually came up with this title for an article about 6 examples of users making mistakes on spreadsheets. USER ERRORS. Not a single implication that Excel was actually at fault in any way.
Greg Sargent:
Why won’t Obama give Republicans what they want? Also note this remarkable quote in Milbank’s piece from one of Boehner’s deputies, Rep. Pete Roskam:
“President Obama has an unbelievable opportunity to be a transformational president — that is, to bring the country together,” he said. “Or he can devolve into zero-sum-game politics, where he wins and other people lose.”
After a four-year scorched earth campaign to render Obama a one-term president explicitly through denying him compromise, Republicans want him to bring the two parties together by agreeing (in exchange for unspecified loophole closings) to give them both the entitlement cuts they want and the tax rates they want.
It would be really, really great if just one national network news journalist pointed out the appalling hypocrisy from the GOP on … anything, really … but specifically these pearl-clutching calls for “compromise” after being clearly repudiated by voters at the national and state level.
Annnnnd my disgust with the GOP and with lazy, superficial “news” reporting continues unabated.
If you flood people with a torrent of cheap and accessible entertainment, meaningful discourse tends falls to the wayside. This is why I believe a Brave New World-style dystopia is far more plausible than a 1984-style one.
More likely a hybrid of the two. Provide an overwhelming quantity of distracting entertainment and then scare everyone into staying inside to watch it. "Find out what could kill your children at 11! Now back to Who Wants to be a Singing Dancing Monkey!"
This is now the third area in which Romney has refused to share specifics on the explicit grounds that so doing would be bad politically for him. Romney has repeatedly said he won’t release his tax returns because Democrats will find things in them to attack. And he has vowed to eliminate whole government agencies, but has confirmed that he won’t specify which ones precisely because his failed Senate bid taught him that getting too specific puts him at risk of losing. As Jonathan Chait has written, this is akin to saying: “One of the things I have found in previous elections is that announcing my plans makes people want to vote against me.”
(Emphasis mine.)
Do your job, media.
Do your job, reporters.
Do your job, cable news.
Do your job, newspapers.
Inform voters clearly and without the “both sides do it” false equivalency, that the Romney campaign is deliberately hiding what a Romney presidency would mean for the country, because the campaign knows that they will lose if voters find out their actual policy plans.
It is absolutely staggering to me that it is possible in this country for a person seeking to be the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES can completely hide everything that person would do if elected and expect voters to be totally fine with that.
The cable news and national network news programs have a responsibility to clearly explain this to voters: Mitt Romney won’t tell you what he plans to do if you elect him, because he believes that if you knew, you wouldn’t vote for him.
That’s just astonishing to me.
Stay classy! The Washington Post used a photo of a cop petting a kitten as their picture for the accompanying article about Oakland police brutally firing into the crowd of OWS Protestors.
Also, look at that headline! Boo young people!
WHY DOES NO ONE SAY THE TEA PARTY IS WEARING OUT THEIR WELCOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe it’s time for protesters to take up residence outside “news” organizations that pull this kind of shit.
From Sociological Images: We’ve posted previously on the tendency of the U.S. media to ignore the rest of the world (in favor of Britney Spears), even changing the cover of magazines sold in the U.S., but not elsewhere, in ways that coddle our ethnocentrism.
Given this phenomenon, this four-minute clip from a Russia Today news program (in English) is particularly striking. The reporter notes that the U.S. media is covering the ongoing foreign political protests more thoroughly, and with more positive enthusiasm, than it has the protests in Wisconsin.
I don’t know if it’s because the major media outlets are all in the hands of corporate overlords, or if it’s just that we patronizingly cheer on the plucky, backwards peasants in their little uprisings against their quirky rulers while our own society falls apart all around our recliners and plasma HDTVs.
Thursday, Middle East/Thursday, USA.
(with pics from breakingintoheaven)
More and more often the US media is just a complete fucking embarrassment.
Before getting too outraged over the article AZSpot quotes entitled “It Is Now Official: The US Is a Police State” about the conviction of Aaifa Siddiqui, take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Siddiqui. If even some of the allegations listed in Wikipedia are correct, then she is hardly the moist-eyed innocent lamb that Paul Craig Roberts claims, and his indignant piece at Antiwar.com is disingenuous propaganda at best, and frothy hysteria at worst.
The far left has mouthpieces as dogmatic and cynical as the far right. I’m reminded of Daniel’s quote from Buddha the other day: “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many…”
