Far too often in the media today, when real news gets a little slow, fake controversies - non-troversies, as we sometimes call them - seem to flood our 24/7 media landscape.
We were treated to an example of this kind of non-troversy last week, when most of the propagandists on the political right went after MSNBC TV host Melissa Harris-Perry. Two of her guests made a joke about Mitt Romney's adopted grandchild, and the non-troversy backed up from there, causing fake outrage to block out some of the other more important news last week, like a traffic jam blocking more important traffic from getting through.
In truth, when MSNBC's Rachel Maddow first began covering the scandal of Governor Chris Christie and the traffic jam on the George Washington bridge - one of the busiest bridges in the world, just north of Manhattan - we honestly thought her producers may have been trying to create another one of those non-troversies.
After the most recent developments in the Christie scandal on Wednesday, however, we've realized two very important things.
The first thing we realized is that, while New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is one of the most bombastic, loud, obnoxious, direct, mean politicians in America today, the Tea Party still apparently doesn't think he's crazy enough for them to support. After all - Christie hugged President Obama after Hurricane Sandy, and most Tea Partiers still think that's a mortal sin.
The second thing we realized is that, once again, Ms. Maddow has some of the best producers in the media industry - and that this story about Gov. Christie using state resources to inflict a personal political payback isn't just a nonsense non-troversy.
In case you'd missed it, a story surfaced recently about the small town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, located just on the other side of the Hudson River from Manhattan. The story implicated some top appointees of Gov. Christie in a scandal in which those appointees - potentially at the behest of Gov. Christie - created a massive traffic jam as political retribution to Fort Lee's mayor. Not only did the traffic disaster disrupt business for nearly a week - but it delayed emergency service workers, leading to the death of a 91-year-old woman, thanks to the gridlocked bridge.
In short, the bridge blockade is the kind of blatant abuse of power that some Americans might associate with the days of Tammany Hall, or the days of the original Mayor Daley in Chicago. Or, as Jon Stewart noted last night on The Daily Show, the kind of first-rate political corruption that New Jersey is legendary for.
That the e-mail correspondence now coming out surrounding the story heavily suggests that Gov. Christie may have called for his appointees to take political payback is scary enough. When you add in the fact that some very astute political pundits believe New Jersey Gov. Christie is one of the best chances the GOP has to win the Presidency in 2016, the story becomes absolutely terrifying.
Pulling off the kind of abuse of power Chris Christie now appears to have been involved with takes an enormous amount of chutzpah. It takes a special kind of evil insanity to do something like that and not end up getting convicted later - for example, like Dick Cheney did with Iraq.
From the Tea Partiers we know, Christie's just not crazy enough - or the right kind of crazy - to win their support for a 2016 run for the presidency.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Hanging By A Thread
While most of America continued to freeze on Tuesday, the U.S. Senate saw a small but measurable political thaw on the issue of extending unemployment insurance for over a million Americans.
As Greg Sargent noted, Tuesday's Senate vote was a small but surprising step forward but there's still a very long way to go. Chris Cillizza agreed with Sargent: Six Republicans voting to join with Democrats in moving the bill forward was a shocker, even if the vote was only to allow the Senate to debate the bill, and wasn't a vote over the actual bill itself.
Still, considering the Republicans in this Congress, we'll take almost any action even resembling good governing practices. Suggestions by some of the more extreme Republican members of Congress, to some of their own constituents who still can't find a job after a long and fruitless search, have effectively boiled down to "go find a set of rafters and an ugly tie."
Some Republicans in the House have become so detached from the concerns of the millions of suffering, unemployed Americans who want jobs, that their own Republican House leadership had to send out a memo this week coaching GOP House members on how to talk - and how NOT to talk - about unemployment. Still, that memo is small progress.
Greg Sargent also noted another sign of progress on Tuesday that a growing number of Republicans in Congress seem to be softening their approach to the unemployed with a more realistic and less disgusting position than "go hang." Those Republicans now seem to have finally changed their tune from insisting the unemployment insurance extension isn't necessary to accepting they'll need to find a way to pay for it.
For those progressive and liberal Democrats who have a decent memory, this pattern of refusal followed by acceptance should ring a bell, as Republicans and Democrats danced similar steps four years ago, when Congress let unemployment insurance lapse around the holiday season in 2010.
Then, like now, some pundits were saying Republicans had never refused to extend unemployment insurance when the unemployment rate was in it's current position. Of course, as Arthur Delany of the Huffington Post reported back then, and as we noted at the time, Republicans have indeed been convinced to extend UI before, when Democrats were able to push them into finding money in the budget for it.
So the problem is obviously not that Republicans can't be convinced to help their fellow Americans.
As Josh Barro noted yesterday in Business Insider, the real problem is that modern Republicans don't actually have an anti-poverty agenda. In fact, as Barro notes further, Republicans don't currently have any realistic plans that would address the major economic issues facing the majority of Americans.
Even if they did have ideas, as Danny Vinik points out, the extremism of the screaming far right has painted the current Republican Party into a corner, and politically emasculated them to the point where they couldn't help struggling poor and middle-class Americans even if they wanted to.
That some few Republicans - at least six in the Senate - are even willing to try to buck their party to help those desperately struggling Americans is at least a small sign of progress.
For now, that small success is what Americans have to hang their political hopes on.
As Greg Sargent noted, Tuesday's Senate vote was a small but surprising step forward but there's still a very long way to go. Chris Cillizza agreed with Sargent: Six Republicans voting to join with Democrats in moving the bill forward was a shocker, even if the vote was only to allow the Senate to debate the bill, and wasn't a vote over the actual bill itself.
Still, considering the Republicans in this Congress, we'll take almost any action even resembling good governing practices. Suggestions by some of the more extreme Republican members of Congress, to some of their own constituents who still can't find a job after a long and fruitless search, have effectively boiled down to "go find a set of rafters and an ugly tie."
Some Republicans in the House have become so detached from the concerns of the millions of suffering, unemployed Americans who want jobs, that their own Republican House leadership had to send out a memo this week coaching GOP House members on how to talk - and how NOT to talk - about unemployment. Still, that memo is small progress.
Greg Sargent also noted another sign of progress on Tuesday that a growing number of Republicans in Congress seem to be softening their approach to the unemployed with a more realistic and less disgusting position than "go hang." Those Republicans now seem to have finally changed their tune from insisting the unemployment insurance extension isn't necessary to accepting they'll need to find a way to pay for it.
For those progressive and liberal Democrats who have a decent memory, this pattern of refusal followed by acceptance should ring a bell, as Republicans and Democrats danced similar steps four years ago, when Congress let unemployment insurance lapse around the holiday season in 2010.
Then, like now, some pundits were saying Republicans had never refused to extend unemployment insurance when the unemployment rate was in it's current position. Of course, as Arthur Delany of the Huffington Post reported back then, and as we noted at the time, Republicans have indeed been convinced to extend UI before, when Democrats were able to push them into finding money in the budget for it.
So the problem is obviously not that Republicans can't be convinced to help their fellow Americans.
As Josh Barro noted yesterday in Business Insider, the real problem is that modern Republicans don't actually have an anti-poverty agenda. In fact, as Barro notes further, Republicans don't currently have any realistic plans that would address the major economic issues facing the majority of Americans.
Even if they did have ideas, as Danny Vinik points out, the extremism of the screaming far right has painted the current Republican Party into a corner, and politically emasculated them to the point where they couldn't help struggling poor and middle-class Americans even if they wanted to.
That some few Republicans - at least six in the Senate - are even willing to try to buck their party to help those desperately struggling Americans is at least a small sign of progress.
For now, that small success is what Americans have to hang their political hopes on.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Frozen In Place
While the Senate appeared almost frozen in place at times on Monday, at least they showed up and did some work, voting to make Janet Yellin the first female head of the Fed. Many other places across the nation were already in a state of closure on Monday, like the city of Indianapolis, which made it illegal to drive anywhere unless it was an emergency. JetBlue airlines grounded flights for 17 hours at four of the busiest airports in America on Monday, and firefighters lost a battle with a house fire in Iowa after their hoses froze.
In short, thanks to a phenomenon known as a 'polar vortex,' much of America became frozen in place yesterday and today as the temperatures across most of the United States are colder right now than any of us have seen in several decades - and that isn't even counting the brutal wind chills.
Not surprisingly, the Fightin' 101st Keyboard Kommandos of the Climate Change Denier Brigades scurried to their 'battle posts' online, throughout the right-wing corporate-controlled media, to denounce and poke fun at both scientists and reality. By their "reasoning" (for lack of a better term), the fact that much of North America is bitterly cold right now negates the possibility that the overall temperature of the planet has been on a constant warming trend for decades. Their oversimplified view of the world also conveniently ignores that while North Americans are freezing our backsides off, Australia is experiencing a record summer heat wave. In other words, local weather and worldwide climate aren't the same thing.
As many science-savvy members of the media - including Jason Samenow of the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang - reminded the nation Monday, the polar vortex in no way disproves climate change. In fact, as Eric Holthaus covered in both Quartz and The Daily Beast on Monday, global climate change can actually make both cold snaps and heat waves even worse.
As the world's overall average temperature rises, areas that were once cooler will become warmer - and when they do, their warmer-than-usual temperature will cause the jet stream to slow down. That slowing down is like an area rug bunching up at the edge of a threshold - higher peaks of heat and moisture are pushed closer together with deep valleys of cold dry air. This leads to peaks of unusually warm weather, followed by crashes into valleys of unusually cold weather - just as much of the country has been experiencing right now.
Whether or not you or anyone believes in the science of climate change, the great - and also horrible - thing about science is that it doesn't care what your personal beliefs are, or what deity you worship. Science is exactly the same for everyone, animals and humans alike, and the facts that science support don't change that.
We might tell you to pass that simple fact on to a climate change denier you know - but we have a feeling the simple of truth of that statement might freeze up their willfully ignorant little minds.
Stay warm and safe, whatever you believe. Frostbite, like both polar bears and science, doesn't care what you believe in either.
In short, thanks to a phenomenon known as a 'polar vortex,' much of America became frozen in place yesterday and today as the temperatures across most of the United States are colder right now than any of us have seen in several decades - and that isn't even counting the brutal wind chills.
Not surprisingly, the Fightin' 101st Keyboard Kommandos of the Climate Change Denier Brigades scurried to their 'battle posts' online, throughout the right-wing corporate-controlled media, to denounce and poke fun at both scientists and reality. By their "reasoning" (for lack of a better term), the fact that much of North America is bitterly cold right now negates the possibility that the overall temperature of the planet has been on a constant warming trend for decades. Their oversimplified view of the world also conveniently ignores that while North Americans are freezing our backsides off, Australia is experiencing a record summer heat wave. In other words, local weather and worldwide climate aren't the same thing.
As many science-savvy members of the media - including Jason Samenow of the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang - reminded the nation Monday, the polar vortex in no way disproves climate change. In fact, as Eric Holthaus covered in both Quartz and The Daily Beast on Monday, global climate change can actually make both cold snaps and heat waves even worse.
As the world's overall average temperature rises, areas that were once cooler will become warmer - and when they do, their warmer-than-usual temperature will cause the jet stream to slow down. That slowing down is like an area rug bunching up at the edge of a threshold - higher peaks of heat and moisture are pushed closer together with deep valleys of cold dry air. This leads to peaks of unusually warm weather, followed by crashes into valleys of unusually cold weather - just as much of the country has been experiencing right now.
Whether or not you or anyone believes in the science of climate change, the great - and also horrible - thing about science is that it doesn't care what your personal beliefs are, or what deity you worship. Science is exactly the same for everyone, animals and humans alike, and the facts that science support don't change that.
We might tell you to pass that simple fact on to a climate change denier you know - but we have a feeling the simple of truth of that statement might freeze up their willfully ignorant little minds.
Stay warm and safe, whatever you believe. Frostbite, like both polar bears and science, doesn't care what you believe in either.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)