Matt Taibbi excoriates the media coverage of the presidential election

Time to focus on the terrible "news coverage" of the election. Matt Taibbi nails it:

Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us [members of the news media] suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. . . . Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi excoriates the media coverage of the presidential election

Romney’s foreign policy, and Obama’s

Glenn Greenwald's caustic article (accurately) sums up Mitt Romney's foreign policy:

[W]e're in a war for freedom against tyranny, and for justice against oppression - a war which Mitt Romney will fight in close alliance with the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. . . . [I]n light of extreme anti-American sentiment, we must drone-bomb more, kill Iranian civilians with sanctions, send more symbols of military occupation to their region, move still closer to Israel (which could only be accomplished by some sort of new surgical procedure to collectively implant us inside of them), and even more vigorously support the repressive Gulf regimes. In other words, to solve the problem of anti-American hatred in the region, we must do more and more of exactly that which - quite rationally - generates that hatred.

Here's the problem: It's almost impossible to distinguish Romney's imperialist foreign policy from that of our "Peace President," Barack Obama.

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The real state of the union

This is an excerpt from a recent post on Public Citizen's Consumer Law and Policy Blog:

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston asks why the United States ranks forty-seventh out of 224 countries in infant mortality, forty-sixth in the share of our economy spent on public education, thirty-seventh in the quality of our health care (with approximately 50 million without insurance), and “dead last” in 2009 among 190 countries on our current account deficit that measures how much more we import than export. He concludes that as a country we have been “letting big business damage and destroy competition, escape tax burdens and push down wages.”

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People actually moved their money

A couple years ago, in response to Arianna Huffington's "Move your Money" campaign, I moved my money from a regional bank to a non-profit credit union. I wasn't alone, as the Guardian reports:

In the US . . . from the start of 2009 to mid-2010, 1.5 million members joined credit unions in a year – the number of new members usually expected in a 14-year period. When you examine how credit unions works, it's easy to see why. Unlike big banks, credit unions don't engage in any form of casino finance. When you deposit money into a credit union account, it isn't invested anywhere or gambled in any way. The only time it is used by the credit union is when it is loaned to other account holders; and even then it is guaranteed by an FSA scheme, meaning that it won't be lost if the loan repayments aren't met. Those who join credit unions are not customers, but members – like a co-operative.

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Plain Broun Wrapper (or, What’s Really In That Bag?)

I thought I might write about something other than politics this morning, but some things are just too there to ignore.  But perhaps this isn’t strictly about politics. Representative Paul Broun of Georgia recently said the following.  I’m pulling the quote from news sources so I don’t get it wrong. “God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingPlain Broun Wrapper (or, What’s Really In That Bag?)