Friday Funday: Effing Freedom

It's Friday, and we're returning to our regular habit of focusing on lighter subjects, and those that may just make you laugh. That's important to us, especially because we fully expect next week to be filled with more of the superfluous political attack on Attorney General Eric Holder, and a pile of rulings from a Supreme Court that's only partially about justice.

So... how about those nuns in busses?

Right now, Catholic bishops and Catholic nuns in busses, are crossing the country - and each other - in the debate about the Affordable Care Act. Just the mental image of busses filled with bishops, following around busses filled with nuns, hollering at the nuns, gives us at least a little bit of a chuckle.

In case you missed it, the bishops are traveling around in busses, insisting that Americans - not just Catholic Americans, but all Americans - campaign AGAINST the Affordable Care Act. The bishops specifically despise the provisions that say all health insurance companies must offer the OPTION to cover birth control in all their policies. As we've discussed previously, the ACA's changes don't include mandatory birth control, nor do they mandate free birth control - both often fictions that right-wing propaganda outlets continue to screech, long after those fictions have been proven false.

To put it bluntly, the bishops want to have the government take away the responsibility and right that Americans now have for their own reproductive health care.

The fact is, no matter what the bishops want, 98% of American women - including Catholics - have used birth control at some time. The large dose of irony involved in the bishops' chief complaint - that their rights are being infringed because they're not being allowed to use the government to infringe upon the rights of others - is one that makes us chuckle deeply. It's almost as though we're watching busses filled with Don Quixotes heading for the proverbial windmills.

Meanwhile, the nuns are also criss-crossing the country, using secularly proven facts - not their bibles - to promote their viewpoints. The nuns are pointing out that the budget and policy plans pushed by Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, and the rest of the Republican Party, will actually create MORE poor Americans, worse social conditions - and probably more unwanted children.

As we've heard from media colleagues in the upper midwest , one group is certainly receiving warmer welcomes in many towns, especially from women.

For the bishops, their bus trip likely didn't get any better with the latest ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Court ruled on Thursday against sanctioning two major television networks - Fox and ABC - regarding the FCC's ban on vulgar words and nudity. Multiple TV and radio hosts immediately joked that they could now begin saying any of the legendary "Seven Words You Can't Say" on air, made famous by comedian George Carlin.

In truth, the Court's ruling doesn't lift the current ban on indecency in broadcast media. It was clear, however, by reading the Justices' opinions, that the Court may be looking at reconsidering the original 1978 "Pacifica" ruling, due to the changes in cable and the internet since 1978.

All of this may result in some cursing and swearing by those same wrinkled old, bitter bishops, trapped on their busses, traveling across the country - slowly.

Sometimes, our job on Fridays is tough, looking at the world and trying to find something to laugh at.

Occasionally though, we look around, see some crazy old men screaming hypocrisy at clouds, and our job becomes incredibly easy.

Maybe today it was simply divine intervention.

RomneyBot

For those of us who work in media and communications that also focus on politics, there's a hazard of the business we often find our colleagues in. The hazard is a myopic focus, and a nearly robotic reaction to get stuck, topically, inside the minutia of statehouses and "The Beltway" in Washington, DC.

For many reasons - not the least of which is that our staff is spread out across half the country - we usually don't fiind ourselves falling into that particular media morass. We're proud that we can take almost any subject and make it exciting.

[Of course, it helps massively to have one of the best editorial cartoonists in the nation - but we're a bit a biased that way.]

The one topic even we've struggled to make exciting, however, is Mitt Romney.

Journalist McKay Coppins is just the latest member of the media to publically note: news about Mitt Romney is bad for the media business. Most online media outlets dislike Romney stories because they drive down traffic significantly. Print media sources we know say top editors are aware that pictures of Romney on the front page drive down readership too. Our colleagues in televison say they've noticed the same problem - and we know intimately it's the same in radio.

It's not that there isn't plenty of controversy surrounding Romney. As we've noted previously, Romney seemes to have a habitual problem with being on all sides of every issue.

The problem is, Mitt Romney has always been on all sides of every issue. That's nothing new. Going back to his first campaign against Ted Kennedy, Romney was accused of just that problem. Mitt's flip-flopping nature hasn't changed, nearly twenty years later. There are even whole websites devoted to "Multiple Choice Mitt."

It's not just that Mitt Romney doesn't seem to have any firmly held beliefs, though. It's that he's a plain, white man, who is a very cautious politician, in some ways. That could be in part due to the gaffe his father, George Romney, made that ended the elder Romney's national political career.

As Garance Franke-Ruta, senior politics editor at TheAtlantic.com, noted: "Romney is a very cautious politician who benefits from operating under the radar and having the focus of the contest be on Obama," she said. "It's Mittness Protection, general election style. The more boring he is, the more attention — which in today's media means negative attention — focuses on Obama."

This is the same tactic - "Mittness Protection", as many in the media have called it - that Mr. Romney used throughout the GOP primaires for President too.

Added to that serial blandness is a very obvious tendency of Mr. Romney to pander to whatever group he happens to be in front of - especially if it's for money. While he refuses to give specifics to the media at large, when people pay thousands of dollars for a moment with Mitt, he tends to tell them whatever he thinks will open their wallets. The media had often assumed this over the last two decades - but earlier this year, thanks to hungry reporter Garrett Haake, that assumption was confirmed.

Finally, you can bank on the fact that most of America is aware of all of Mr. Romney's boring tendancies - and that they've already made up their minds on how they feel about Mr. Romney.

So what do you call someone who is one of the two major candiates for Preisdent, who actively attempts to appear as inoffending and mechanical as possible, while being willing to take the positions of whomever is funding his latest political campaign?

We call him RomneyBot.

Through The Looking Glass

In case you missed the news coming from the G20 meeting being held in Mexico over the past few days, President Obama and Europe's leaders both seemed to be looking at each other's problems and wincing, glad they were not in the other guy's shoes.

If you only pay attention to American media, we can see how you might have missed any news coming from the G20. From the meeting between President Obama and Russia's President Putin, to discussions about what to do about Syria, to the economic decisions that will likely influence nearly everyone on the planet, the G20 is quite obviously not the place for the kinds of amateur political stunts that lead the headlines in much of American political media.

That seriousness was very clear from the address and press conference President Obama gave last night, to U.S. and foreign media organizations, at the end of the G20 meetings.

Unfortunately, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's recent attempt to impose internal American politics on the Eurozone - specifically upon Germany - raised its ugly head, during the President's presser.

Much of the U.S. media either missed or purposely ignored the recent op-ed in the German business journal "Handelsblatt", written by one of Mr. Romney's top economic advisors, Glenn Hubbard. Hubbard's piece followed the vague line of Romney's own current economic plans, advising the Germans to increase austerity while ignoring investment - which is exactly the opposite of what Europe needs to do.

For those who understand that certain protocols involving international politics have been created for a reason, the blatant attempt by Mr. Romney to influence the economic policy of a foreign nation - in order to influence our own American elections - is just plain rude.

President Obama and the White House, as they handled other recent significant violations of respect and decorum, treated the op-ed published in the German business journal from the Romney camp with an amazing amount of class and respect. The White House barely uttered a word about the Romney camp's overreach, simply allowing Mitt Romney and his advisors to appear to be small and craven.

That continued on Tuesday evening at the President's press conference when he was asked again about the German op-ed piece.

President Obama deferred criticism of Mr. Romney and his advisors' op-ed back to the Romney campaign, and reminded the media that America has, "one president at a time and one administration at a time. And I think traditionally, the notion has been that America’s political differences end at the water’s edge.”

The President went one step further, reminding the gathered media that Romney's advisor, "may not be familiar with what our suggestions to the Germans have been" - which made both Romney and his advisor look like simple meddlers.

The fact is, France - one of the two most powerful economic forces in the Eurozone - has a new left-leaning government, one that has no plans to continue with the failed austerity plans that Mr. Romney and his advisors were pushing.

As the news from the G20 made clear, the leaders of Europe have begun to move towards the Keynesian economic ideas of President Obama, and France's new President Hollande, including significant internal investment. Europe's leaders also made it clear the previously non-integrated nature of the Eurozone will be changing rapidly, a reform President Obama and others have been urging for some time.

In short, the latest G20 meetings may have been one of the few gatherings of world leaders we've seen that actually seemed to accomplish a great deal in a short period of time.

We just hope all the G20 leaders follow through on their plans, speedily, or we'll all be poor examples for world leadership.

Very poor examples indeed.