I suppose it’s nice to see the so-called liberal media finding its collective gonads in recent weeks. Finally, they’re not all that afraid of the Bushies. But even now, the best stuff is coming from the folks who were never all that afraid of Bushco. Frank Rich’s most recent piece in the New York Times is quite good. The most important point, in my humble opinion, is that Watergate wasn’t over when some of Nixon’s aides were indicted. That was really just the beginning, in a sense. It took two more years to nail the big enchilada.

My friend Mark sent me this. I’d link to him, but he’s about the only person I know who lacks a web presence.

I love this article. Income inequality, wealth re-distribution, and the “third world-ization” of the U.S. through an open, obvious class war by the super-rich are all rolled up into one big issue for me that’s probably my biggest issue.

I’m likely to be an Edwards supporter if he run in ‘08. He has exactly the message that I think the Democratic Party should be advocating: this society needs to reward work, not wealth and investment. We need to do something serious about reducing poverty because it’s completely within our power to do so.

I just saw the Fox Newsiest thing ever. I walked into the break area at work and found the Fitzgerald press conference airing live on FoxNews. As he was going into an answer about how the GOP talking points dismissing perjury, etc as “technicalities” wouldn’t fly, I looked at the ticker on the bottom of the screen. They went straight from summarizing previous remarks he had made to posting several items in a row about unwed mothers and unwed teen mothers. It was so blatant that I almost couldn’t believe I was seeing it.

I wish I were Finnish. Inside of this article, they specifically mention something that has always been my view on the benefit of socialism. It seems so self-evidently obvious to me that I just don’t get why it’s even disputed. I find it kind of amusing that all of the evidence on the ground seems to contradict the views of the quasi-free-marketeer Finnish economist that they interview in it.

Anyhoo, this is the quote that best embodies my view of things:

“When people can fulfill their potential they become innovators,” Dr. Himanen argues. “The innovative economy is competitive and makes it possible to finance the welfare state, which is not just a cost, but a sustainable basis for the economy, producing new innovators with social protection.”

In today’s Washington Post, Terry Neal quite thoroughly addresses what I wrote about in my October 18th post on the now apparent hypocrisy of the GOP and their respect for the rule of law. I also saw a nice little piece on The Daily Show, I believe, where a number of anchors and talking heads on FuxNews dutifully spouted the GOP’s talking points decrying the “criminalization of politics”. And, of course, I have specific memory of about 90% of those folks spounding off about the “rule of law” during the Clinton scandals.

Orwell proves out again.

I’ve written before about a phenomenon that we’re on the verge of seeing writ large in American politcs. To a certain extent, with Tom DeLay, we’ve already seen the right defending an accused criminal because he’s one of their own. They’ve made accusations straight from the Clinton playbook on this. Well, I think we’re about to see that erupt if Cheney and his top aides are indicted. The shame of it is that I think most of the allegations against Ken Starr and his team were true. I don’t say this because I’m a partisan. In fact, I think it’s somewhat fair to say that Ken Starr and the vast right wing conspiracy turned me into a Democrat. I didn’t vote for Bill Clinton in either election.

I think the public eventually got that Starr and his ilk were partisans who were trying to overturn an election. I think they got that there was no substance to the charges and that the impeachment was a witch hunt. I thought that for a good couple of years, at least. My faith has been shaken many times over the last five years, though. I honestly believe that the Bush administration has committed serious crimes, crimes that wouldn’t have been committed by some of the top contenders for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. When it seemed as if the american public didn’t care about these things either, I began to formulate my views on our post-political society. I think maybe I’ll see those views put to the test in the next couple of years. It’s vaguely possible that’ll happen with DeLay, but I don’t think he’s a big enough fish nor do I think the crimes for which he’s indicted are clear enough and obvious enough. Cheney would be a different story, though. If he’s indicted and the public doesn’t care, then I’m right. But if he’s indicted and the political pressure actually forces him to resign, no one will be more pleasantly surprised than I.

Well, if you read my last post and were totally effing confused by it, there’s a good reason. I pasted in the wrong damn link. The article that it all referred to was HERE

I’m fixing the original post right now. Damn, damn, damn.

This Article is really interesting. Thanks to Cat Rambo for passing this along. It rather immediately reminded me of the Gandhi quote “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Since this seems to be media day here at policywank, this struck a nerve with me about the role of the media in our culture. I’ve long believed and commented that one of the greatest victories for the right wing, for the corporations, and the forces of reaction generally in this country was to turn apathetic cynicism into the definition of cool in youth culture. Once infected with that notion, I don’t believe that most people have any desire to overcome it. Many who have the desire lack the tools or committment to do so.

In order to see the kind of world that humanists and leftists wish to see, you have to have people who are committed to the belief that people aren’t inherently bad. You have to have people who believe that there’s more to “human nature” than self-interest. You have to have people who are willing to live our higher impulses without expecting to ever see a reward for it. You need some selflessness.

The article notes that even after viewing video evidence of these elevated behaviors, people were in an elevated state. They were inspired to do better things, filled with feelings of love and playfulness, etc. Our media does nothing but promote fear, aggression, violence, and our basest instincts. That’s certainly not a new critique. It’s not even necessarily a leftist critique, especially not in this country where the left is often reduced to the laissez faire banality of “if you don’t like it, change the channel”. I suppose the logical end of that line of reasoning is that if you don’t like any of it, you should unplug. For most people, that’s not a practical option. It is simply a fact that a certain degree of familiarity with the mainstream media is necessary as a social lubricant and is often necessary in that regard to success in our chosen careers, etc. The entertainment media seems to serve no other political purposes than to spur consumption and to harden our hearts with cynicism. If people were to believe that they could change things, they might just try.

I think our media could be put to a better use, a use that wouldn’t even necessarily be partisan. I think there are basic acts of human goodness that are as admired by the typical american on the left as they are by the typical american on the right and most americans in between. This can be done without resorting to hoaky attempts to tug on the heart strings or provide sanitized “family friendly” schlock. We have the regulatory power to promote that kind of programming. And if you wanna stay neo-liberal, theoretically, we have the market power to force the change.

I wonder just what modern life would be like if our media focused more on acts that demonstrate and inspire the elevation discussed in that article. Might it not help to contribute to the inverse of the downward spiral that our culture has been in during recent decades?

I have been more or less unplugged from the media since Saturday. On Saturday, all I saw was college football. It’s really been quite nice. I haven’t even had the opportunity to keep up on my email. Now that I’m slowly plugging back in, I’m finding myself more irritated than usual. I guess this is the media equivalent of not knowing how smelly a room is until you go outside and get some fresh air.

If I were willing to pay for all the TV channels that my cable system offers, I would have somewhere around 300 channels. I don’t get the CBC. Al Gore’s hideous “Current” channel killed the best thing on cable: NewsWorld International. I don’t get the BBC. BBC America doesn’t count. I don’t get any broadcast or cable channels from Canada, the UK, or Australia. I don’t get the English language versions of broadcast systems from elsewhere in the world. Hell, I can’t even get CNN International, which presents an oh so slightly less reactionary take on the news than CNN. On day’s like today, I almost have trouble faulting my fellow countrymen for their ignorance of the world. It really seems as if our media companies conspire to keep us inside this tidy little reactionary bubble, a nation of Number Sixes who can’t leave their picturesque village.

Screw democracy, it’s salsa music that creates peace and love among the peoples of the world. One thing I can say for sure is that it’s hard to root your sexual repression in this music.

It’s interesting that after so many hundreds of years, the latin world and the arab world are still so intertwined.