Missing From The List

As Republicans in the Senate prepare to skip town, before all their work is done, and join the millions of Americans already on holiday break, we've also begun preparing for own own holiday break next week. Unlike at many workplaces, however, we're all still putting in full days  - even our editor Amy, who is nearly nine months pregnant.

That kind of tenacious work ethic obviously isn't the norm at every media organization.

We say "obviously" because of what we see every day. We see the hundreds of stories that race around the media daily, and we cultivate them for you in the dozens of links in our daily extended edition. If you think the list of links we give you is extensive, you should see the massive lists of links we collect daily that don't make it into our final edition.

That kind of thorough curation gives our staff a particular ability to look around the media industry and tell when people are focusing on a truly important story - like Medicaid expansion efforts in our home state of Nebraska - or when our media colleagues are blowing up a ridiculous piece of trash as a huge story because they'd rather not actually perform real journalism that day.

You can call us media Grinches if you'd like -  and we're certain Beltway whiners like Chris Cilizza will. That name calling still won't change a simple fact: News doesn't care that journalists, like most Americans at this time of year, would rather give a half-effort at work because their minds are already on vacation.

The perfect example of this kind of massive yet lazy media distraction is the "Duck Dynasty" incident sucking up most the media's attention right now.

In case you'd missed it, an ignorant, Southern redneck member of the "reality show" called "Duck Dynasty" gave an ignorant, bigoted, redneck interview to GQ, that just hit the media this week. A&E, the channel that presents the show, decided to suspend the offending member for the indefinite future. Not surprisingly, the ignorant rednecks that the GOP panders to these days immediately saw the suspension as a personal attack from 'the lib'rul meedia' on their way of life. That, of course, led the pandering hypocrites in the GOP to immediately condemn A&E, and claim that the cable channel was violating the First Amendment right of Republicans' favorite redneck to say whatever he wanted, yet reap no repercussions from his poorly chosen words.

The irony that these same idiots recently pushed MSNBC to ask for the resignation of noted journalist Martin Bashir, after Bashir said something on TV that offended them, continues to escape these people.

The fact that there are also a host of FAR more important stories getting pushed out of the media spotlight by their latest stunt hasn't likely even occurred to the idiots fighting the 'Duck Dynasty' wars.

For example, Obamacare continues to prove its becoming a massive success every day. Democrats around the nation are also going to be making a massive media push over the holiday break to try to get Congress to extend unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed, who Congress screwed over at the end of this year.

There are stories about Iran's temporary peace deal with the West, the massive credit card breach at Target stores, same sex marriage becoming legal in New Mexico, and even the Christmas story of President Obama commuting the draconian drug sentences of eight Americans who'd already served more than enough time.

Most of those stories though, were missing from the lists of many of our lazier colleagues in the media today. Thankfully, as we noted previously, we'll have all of those stories and more in our expanded edition later this afternoon.

After all, some of us in the media are still putting in full work days.