Facts, Flim-Flam, Fans, & Fun

As we noted last Friday, the August recess for the staff and members of the U.S. House and Senate begins today - which means at least traffic will be better for us in DC over the weekend. In Nebraska, we're getting ready for Husker Fan Day today, and the start of Husker Football practice on Monday, while in our South Florida office, it's just a weekend off - which is a reason to celebrate anyway.

Before DC becomes as empty and shallow as some of its politicians already are, we wanted to give credit for some great work in the media this week, as well as call out at least one sad example of chicanery.

The award for the slimiest and most unexpected slant-job from a major media organization this week has to go to the Associated Press. Whoever wrote their so-called "Fact Check" on President Obama's comments about jobs and the Keystone pipeline either must be getting a nice subsidy from one of the right-wing billionaires, or they must have had experience as an advance man for a two-bit traveling carnival.

The President's entire reason for mentioning the permanent jobs that Keystone won't generate is because it won't actually generate many permanent jobs, as confirmed both by Cornell University and the State Department! Not only does the AP piece confirm the President indeed told the truth about the permanent jobs numbers. It crams that key bit of information into the last graph of the piece, as though a copy editor might have said to the writer responsible for that dreck"Add this before publishing - or else."

Thankfully, there are a few other people in the media who deserve the kind of praise the writer of this week's AP smear job can only dream of receiving.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line blog at The Washington Post has been superb lately, about many topics, including the continuing crack-up of the GOP, and Republican's quixotic quest to kill Obamacare. If you haven't read his work lately, or the work of Jonathan Bernstein and Jamelle Bouie, who also sometimes publish at The Plum Line, we highly recommend you click over and check them out.

Our acquaintance Lisa Desjardan at CNN also had an incredible piece that confirmed something we'd been meaning to research ourselves. Thankfully, it's not just our imagination: Part of why Congress is getting less done than they ever have before is because Congress is in DC working far fewer hours and days than they used to.

We also have to give big kudos to Michael Jantze, one of our favorite cartoonists, who is attempting something few have ever even tried before. He's reviving his much-loved, nationally syndicated, daily cartoon strip 'The Norm' through social media and crowd sourced funding. His efforts appear to be paying off well, as his campaign will be bringing "The Norm back to full daily status, which we're incredibly pleased to see. [Also - Full disclosure: Multiple staff members have donated to Jantze's project. Happily.]

No matter what you're doing this weekend, or where you're at, we hope you remember: As important as politics is to us and to most of you, our readers, there's a lot more to life than just Democrats and Republicans, elections and laws.

For example, Husker football...

Can't Hold Back The Tide

As we swim through hundreds of stories daily, some days are more difficult than others to keep our heads above the metaphorical waterline. From Major League Baseball's possible lifetime ban of Alex Rodriguez, to George Zimmerman being stopped in Texas for speeding (with a gun in his car, of course), to the latest NSA hearing, and the continually less civil intra-party GOP war, Wednesday's pool of stories kept us from getting as much accomplished as we would have liked.

Thankfully though, a few things did get done in Washington, DC yesterday.

For once, the House did something shocking, by actually doing something. The lower chamber voted overwhelmingly to pass a bipartisan deal to keep student loan interest rates low, in the short term, while raising the rates later on. Frankly, we think some House members were willing to say yes to almost anything, just so they could get out of chambers and get their free Jamba Juice smoothies. Still - if that's what it takes to get Congress to actually do something, we know a certain PR person in DC that we're fairly sure would be willing to give out free smoothies every day.

There were also some meetings between Congressional Democrats and the President, and Speaker Boehner and House Republicans on Wednesday - and both get-togethers dealt partially with Obamacare.

Even with rising levels of Democratic frustration and serious opposition to President Obama trying to stuff Larry Summers in as new chief of the Fed, we'd much rather be dealing with the Democratic side of the DC divide than being part of the metaphorical drainplug that is the Republican Party right now.

As Greg Sargent noted on Wednesday, Speaker Boehner insisted in his meeting that House Republicans' plan to shut down the government in order to stop Obamacare will work. Privately, however, it's obvious that Boehner does not want to shut down the government over Obamacare - and neither do some key allies of Boehner in the Senate.

One such ally, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, even commissioned a report from the Congressional Research Service about government shutdowns and Obamacare. As Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post reported and Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff confirmed, the CRS made it clear: Even if Republicans shut down the government, certain agencies tasked with implementing Obamacare will still keep floating along.

That may not be the case for either Speaker Boehner or the GOP.

As Steve Benen pointed out, Boehner can't even seem to understand polls that say how much he's disliked right now. That isn't surprising in light of a new poll from Pew Research which confirmed that Republican voters can't even decide what direction they want their party to go, or who they want to lead. The only thing Republicans seem to agree on is that they're mad.

Frankly, we don't disagree with them on that, though we're almost certain their definition of mad and ours aren't quite the same thing in this case.

After all, when it's obvious to any sane observer that a specific political party has permanently lost the policy battle on a specific issue like universal health care insurance, why would that party's leader keep pretending to fight for that lost cause? That's especially true if the people surrounding that leader will crucify the leader if they find out about the betrayal.

Trying to stop progress from flowing forward is like trying to stop the ocean from flowing through a seawall - and we're very glad we're not the ones stuck in the metaphorical drainhole.

Crocodile Tears From The Corporate Right

If you're tired of talking about inequality now, we have a feeling that by the time August gets done you'll be ready to do whatever it takes to get politicians to make inequality go away - which may indeed be part of the President's broader plan.

The fact is, severe inequality is at the root of nearly every major political dispute going on in America right now - which is why President Obama is absolutely correct in focusing on trying to solve it.

We're well aware that Republicans and those on the corporate right want the discussion of this topic to go away. They're already bawling crocodile tears to right-wing media outlets about one part of the President's "Grand bargain for middle-class jobs' that he laid out in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Tuesday.

As the President himself admitted, parts of that plan are items he's already offered in the past, multiple times. For example, the President's proposal to drop the top corporate tax rate, in exchange for closing tax loopholes that corporations use to get out of paying their taxes, is one he's made before, repeatedly.

One of the newer pieces of the President's plan, however, is the prevalence of the idea of an increase in the minimum wage, to effectively make it a living wage. Of course, as soon as the corporate right hears this phrase, they immediately explode into tears as fake as their concern for the working class of America.

As Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Tuesday, business in America would actually really like to have a plan like the one President Obama suggested at the Amazon warehouse in Kentucky on Tuesday. When corporate tax rates fall and the government invests in new infrastructure, business gets a win-win situation.

Ironically, as Bouie also pointed out, American corporate executives want the kinds of jobs that Amazon became notorious for in 2012, when investigative journalist Mac McClelland exposed Amazon's warehouses as less then desirable places to work.

The key fact remains, however, that in an economy fueled by consumer spending, if consumers don't have money to spend, that economy will be running on fumes. If those consumers have enough money to live decently, those consumers - who are also often the workers for companies in that economy - will go out and spend that money, and the company will end up making more money and being more successful.

Contrary to right-wing blowhards, raising the minimum wage does not increase unemployment. As a new study shows, if corporations like McDonalds used their resources wisely, for less than 70 cents more per Big Mac, the entire company could double the salaries of every low-wage worker in their company.

To anyone not blinded by partisan rhetoric and classist weeping, President Obama's plan for middle class jobs is a big win for Americans of all economic classes and American businesses too. That still won't prevent the corporate right from bawling those crocodile tears to their propaganda outlets.

If you'd like to stop their hypocritical blubbering though, we recommend you do as the President did in Chattanooga: Ask them to present their own alternative plan that will help working poor of America.

We'll guarantee then all you'll hear from the right is silence...