My University’s spring break starts this week, and I’m going on a roadtrip down the coast.
My internet access will be limited, so posting will be pretty scarce until Thursday or Friday.
Have a good week, and I hope the weather is nice wherever you are,
DS
Remember Hillary Clinton’s red phone ad, which told us to rely on her experience to protect us?
Remember that little girl, safe and asleep in bed, kept safe by Hillary Clinton?
Well, it turns out that the footage used in that ad was 8-year-old stock footage of Casey Knowles, now 17.
And it turns out that Knowles is not just an Obama supporter; she was an Obama precinct captain in the Washington caucus.
“I think it would be really wonderful if me and Barack Obama could get together and make a nice counter ad,” Knowles said.
[...]
Casey would, however, prefer that Hillary, rather than John McCain, answer that 3 A.M. call. She tells King5.com that she’ll vote for Hillary in the general should she win the nomination.
A bit of an embarrassing gaffe on the part of the Clinton campaign.
Lesson for the candidates: next time, make sure the people in your ads actually support your candidate.
I’m sorry about the light posting this weekend—I went up to New York and didn’t have access to a computer.
On Saturday night, I ended up calling a few friends of mine to get the results of the South Carolina Primary and to hear what the media was saying about the contest. Tomorrow I’ll have my usual post reviewing that race and looking at the races ahead.
An interesting note, though—there were Huckabee supporters collecting email addresses and handing out stuff in Manhattan today. I saw at least three tables set up near Times Square, with two or three people manning each table. I’m surprised the Huckabee camp is putting much effort into New York—I severely doubt it’s going to be fertile territory for the former Arkansas Governor.
All in all, I had a good weekend—and I hope you did too. I’ll be back with my usual posts on politics sometime tomorrow—make sure to check back.
Daily Variety writes that film director Oliver Stone “has set his sights on his next directing project, ‘Bush,’ a film focusing on the life and presidency of George W. Bush.” He has chosen actor Josh Brolin to play the leading part. Stone told Variety that he wants this movie to be a deep introspective:
Here, I’m the referee, and I want a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world? It’s like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I’ll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning, preemptive attack on Iraq. It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors.
I thought Josh Brolin was excellent in No Country For Old Men.
I’m interested to see how this turns out, and I wonder how easy it will be for Stone to find information on one of the most secretive administrations in American history.
Happy New Year, everyone! Due to the holiday, posting for the rest of today will be light.
When you’re celebrating tonight, take a moment to remember the 899 American soldiers who were killed in Iraq this past year. For each of them, there is a family whose New Year’s celebration will forever be one person short.
Due to the holiday, I won’t be posting later today (unless there’s some important breaking news later). So step away from your computer a bit and go spend time with those you love.
If you want to read something political, you can take a look at my post on the “War on Christmas,” which was featured on Salon’s Blog Report.
I wrote a bit about this before, mostly talking about The Clinton Rules of Engagement, but it’s something I feel warrants a lot more consideration.
Matthew Yglesias has a good takedown of Tim Russert, one of the worst members of the political press (sometimes called “The Villagers” by Atrios and others). The entire piece is good, but this part stands out the most:
The reason, of course, is that Russert doesn’t care — at all — about whether or not his actions inform the American electorate. Rather, he cares about creating a “news-making” event — likely something embarrassing for the politician — and about burnishing his reputation for toughness. He attracts a circle of admirers who share his perverse and unethical lack of concern for whether or not his work helps produce an informed public, gobs of less-prominent television journalists seek to emulate his lack of concern with informing the public, print journalists eagerly court opportunities to appear on the non-informative shows hosted by Russert and his emulators, and down the rabbit hole we go.
Russert’s attitude is, sadly, the dominant one among the political press—a lot of them couldn’t care less about producing an informed electorate. Most of us never get to meet a political candidate ourselves–we can’t sit down with them and talk to them and get to know their positions. Most of us rely on the political press to inform us about the candidates–they are the prism through which we view every election.
Unfortunately, the political press doesn’t care much about truth–they care about ratings. The media boils down to a handful of major corporations, all of which are focused on ratings and profits, not education and fairness. This means our political press is obsessed with entertaining people, not educating them.
Thus, to make politics more interesting, the political press tries to spice it up with fake controversies and baseless rumors, in lieu of talking about the issues. This puts us Democrats at a disadvantage, since we’re almost always right on the issues, which the political press doesn’t want to talk about. Meanwhile, the right-wing machine spends its days pumping out misinformation and rumors, trying to generate non-scandals against Democrats–which the political press is all too glad to pick up and run with, no matter how ridiculous the allegation is.
Remember in 2000, how the political press decided Gore was too smart and stiff and unexciting, while George Bush was the fun, entertaining guy everyone wants to have a beer with? I can’t remember how often the idiotic “person we’d all like to have a beer with” metric was brought up. That has no place in a Presidential election—the questions we should ask is, who will do a better job? Who will be the better President? Who has the best ideas? Who will improve this great country of ours? Personally, I don’t care if a politician is a bit wonky or dorky or stiff—as long as they’d be a good President, I’m happy to support them.
It’s frustrating, because those of us who follow politics see the political press take what should be a serious issue–a presidential election–and turn it into little more than rumor-mongering. They try to boost their ratings by treating politicians like they treat celebrities and treating political news the way they treat celebrity news–they want to treat Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani like Britney Spears and K-Fed. Problem is, the way the press treats Britney and K-Fed won’t have any affect on my life or your life; the way they treat Presidential candidates will.
Politics is serious business, even if it is a bit boring. The role of the political press is to do their best to accurately and fairly inform the population, so we can make the best decisions possible. Instead, they resort to high-school level rumor-mongering and gossip, treating our presidential candidates as they treat celebrities. In the end, we all lose, because the prism through which we get our information is deeply, horribly broken–all we can see through it is a twisted view of the world.
UPDATE: Firedoglake pointed me in the direction of this study [PDF] from Harvard’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. It finds that the press has “offered Americans relatively little information about their records or what they would do if elected,” instead focusing on the mechanics of the campaign itself or the personal characteristics of the candidates.
It also defeats the “we’re just giving them what they want” argument that the political press uses to justify their negligent reporting–77% of people want more coverage of the candidate’s positions on the issues, while 45% want less coverage of who’s leading in the polls (the horse race, which the political press loves to obsess over).
If you have some time, read through the findings of the study–they’re incredibly informative. Basically, it proves what I and a lot of other people have been saying for a while: the political press is doing a bad job, and the American people are fed-up with the way they cover (or fail to cover) elections.
The Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which prevents employers from discriminating against their employees due to sexual orientation, passed by the House of Representatives yesterday, 235-184. In a historic, bipartisan vote, 35 Republicans joined 200 Democrats in standing up for the basic rights of millions of LGB Americans.
Of course, conservative bigotry was on display as Republicans pulled out all the stops, resorting to their familiar tactic of throwing up as many roadblocks as the House rules will allow to kill this bill. I’m sure John Boehner and his gang were combing through the rules to find every possible procedural kink to put this bill down for good. In a last-ditch effort to kill ENDA, they claimed it would legalize gay marriage, an allegation pulled out of thin air–ENDA is an employer discrimination bill that has nothing to do with marriage.
That’s the GOP for you–if you can’t beat ‘em with the truth, lie.
Fortunately, their dishonesty and obstruction failed and ENDA passed. Representative Barney Frank, one of only two openly gay members of Congress, gave a passionate speech denouncing Republican obstruction and urging his colleagues to support the bill:
“But here’s the deal: I used to be someone subject to this prejudice. And through luck, circumstance, I got to be a big shot. I’m now above that prejudice. But I feel an obligation, to 15-year-olds dreading to go to school because of the torments, to people they’ll lose their job in a gas station if someone finds out who they love. I feel an obligation to use the status I have been lucky enough to get, to help them. And I want to ask my colleagues here, Mr. Speaker, on a personal basis, please don’t fall for this sham. Don’t send me out of here having failed to help those people.”
It’s a historic day, culminating a nearly thirty-year-long effort to prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation. Let’s all celebrate with some dancing.
Sorry again for the spotty posting but, like I said, its midterms season–I have a lot on my plate and little free time.
I caught some of the World Series game tonight, which ended with Boston beating Colorado 4-3 to sweep the series. I was rooting for Colorado, but the Sox were clearly the better team, and they deserved to win. Congratulations guys–2004 wasn’t a fluke, your team is officially uncursed. Careful, though–once your fans get used to winning, they’ll be awfully disappointed if you get yourselves into another 86-year slump.
In another hemisphere, Argentine first lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner declared victory tonight in her bid to succeed her husband, Nestor Kirchner, as President. Nestor was credited with helping Argentina recover after the financial meltdown of 2001-2002, and Cristina has pledged to continue her husband’s successful economic policies.
None of her rivals have conceded, but Kirchner presently leads with enough votes to avoid a runoff, and election officials have confirmed that there have been no voting irregularities. The next president will begin a four-year term on December 10th, and will face a variety of problems such as inflation, an energy shortage and crime–this in a nation that used to rank among the world’s 10 wealthiest.
Kirchner is the first woman elected to lead Argentina, though Isabel Peron–wife of Juan Peron–ruled briefly after her husband’s death before being overthrown several years later. Kirchner joins Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Golda Mier, and many others as the first woman elected to lead her nation.
Congrats Boston and Kirchner–both of you are bringing home a victory tonight. And sometimes it just feels good to win.
Take a look at this diagram of proposed federal spending for 2008.
The President’s requested 2008 federal discretionary budget is 1.075 trillion dollars; 67% (717 billion) is allocated for military spending, while only 33% (358 billion) is allocated for non-military spending.
This shows visually where all the money is allocated–notice how large some parts are as compared to others. And the large circle around the outside? That’s our debt, which is several times larger than the entire proposed budget for next year.
It’s an interesting visual representation of where your tax money goes. And, if you’d like, you can order one as a massive poster. Just something interesting I thought I’d share with you (all 13 of you).
Take a look at this interesting map of the internet.
It was created by a group called Information Architects Japan, who listed the 200 most successful websites for 2007, organized by proximity, success, popularity and perspective.
Their post on the map can be read here. You can order a poster version of it here.
Just something interesting I wanted to share.
