Do Look Now

Barring another international emergency, tragedy, or mass civil unrest, much of the American national media chatter today will likely surround two kinds of stories.

One will likely be the sudden shift by Republicans to join Democrats in supporting comprehensive immigration reform. The other will surround two interviews with President Obama - one in The New Republic magazine, and the other, Obama's 60 Minutes interview alongside outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While each of these news items deserve at least some attention, as we warned you in our first edition this year, the real political action to watch has moved to the state and local level.

That fact was evident last week, when media organizations including this one pointed out the Republican Party's underhanded attempts at rigging the vote in Virginia. After the initial Virginia vote-rigging story came to light, other attempts by the Republican Party to try to do the same in states like Florida and Michigan popped up too.

In Nebraska, Republicans appear to be trying to play a bait-and-switch game, at both the state and local levels, that's falling hard on students they claim to care about.

You may recall that earlier this month, Nebraska Republican Governor Dave Heineman pushed all six of Nebraska's University and State College campuses to implement a two-year tuition freeze. Nominally, the freeze was promoted by officials of both parties as a way to help lessen the burden on students.

That rhetoric shows itself to be completely hollow, however, in light of the Nebraska Board of Regents passing an increase for room and board for all students living in the residence halls at each of the six Nebraska state college campuses. While the percentages differ from school to school, the rate increases effectively add between four-hundred and a thousand dollars to the financial burden of those same students that Nebraska politicians claimed they cared about.

The hypocrisy doesn't stop at the state level, though.

Nebraska Republican state Sen. Scott Lautenbaugh also appears to be trying to forcibly downsize the Omaha Public School's board, from the state legislature, taking the board from twelve to nine members and in the process 'conveniently' wiping out the influence of Democratic members of the board.

If the game Republican partisans at all levels are playing hasn't yet become clear to you, we hope this bit of light helps.

Since they can't win at the ballot box with their outdated ideologies, extremist Republican political leaders at all levels are now trying to rig the system, even while they distract the national media by appearing to finally move toward bipartisanship on ideas like comprehensive immigration reform.

Even well-known conservative pundits who've thought about these ideas say Republican leaders who keep pushing ideas like vote-rigging will only end up hurting themselves in the end.

No matter how much cheating those GOP extremists do, it won't change the facts on the ground. The ideas President Obama focused on in his inaugural address aren't liberal - they're progressively centrist. They're ideas that both Republican and Democratic voters mostly agree on.

As soon as Americans notice that Republican "leaders" are attempting to rig systems against those centrist ideas - like they did when their intents were brought to light in Virginia and Florida - Republican "leaders" backpedal away from their cheating ideas so fast their heads are likely spinning round in circles.

There is, after all, a reason it says on Nebraska's state capitol building, "The salvation of the state is watchfulness in the citizen."

It would help everyone if more of our colleagues in the media also kept their eyes on where the action is really happening.

Friday Funday: Wishes

Unless you're living in the farthest Southern reaches of the United States, if you're like most Americans, you've probably been wishing for warmer temperatures this past week. It has been bitterly cold in some regions, especially after the relatively mild winter most of the United States has experienced.

The fact is, wishing the weather was warmer today won't make it so - though traveling to our South Florida offices might help our staff members living in Virginia and Nebraska. Of course, if we received all of our wishes, the world might be a very different place indeed.

Still, we shouldn't belittle the wishes we did see come true this week, starting with the second Inaugural address of President Obama. We also got to see Secretary of State Clinton put a few arrogant members of Congress in their place, and we got Thursday's announcement of full gender equity in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Our staff members didn't get all their hopes and wishes fulfilled this week. For example, we didn't win the lottery. We also didn't get filibuster reform.

True filibuster reform in the U.S. Senate, including the talking filibuster and the elimination of secret holds, was completely thrown overboard by Senator Harry Reid in what appears to have been a deal for a debt ceiling agreement with Minority Leader McConnell. Liberals and progressives are justifiably outraged with Reid, who effectively got nothing from Senate Republicans, except the same kind of handshake agreement that Republicans violated early in the last Congress.

We wish more of the American public had listened to those pundits who said Reid was likely to cave on this issue.

There was one more wish that began to take root this week, and promises to flower later this year.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other Senators presented a new assault weapons ban proposal on Thursday, that addresses many of the problems both supporters and detractors had with the previous ban. The fact that Americans overwhelmingly support many of the pieces of this new gun safety legislation bodes well for key parts of it, especially the overwhelming support for universal background checks.

Overall, while we didn't get every one of our most treasured wishes granted, we did have a positive and healthy week.

Sometimes, that's all anyone can wish for.

Heroes And Cowards

At The Daily Felltoon, our standing rule on both credit and blame is simple, and hasn't changed since we began five years ago: We'll give credit when it's due, and allot blame when it's been earned.

Lately, many of our colleagues in the media - specifically, the sports media - have been focused on fallen heroes. From Lance Armstrong to Manti Te'o to pretty much all of Major League Baseball - including every media organization and baseball fan [For the record, that's our entire staff too] - the list of so-called heroes that have become an embarrassment has placed a pall over much of the media, with many rhetorically wondering where all the heroes have gone.

The heroes never left. They're just not wearing sports uniforms - and they're surrounded by cowards, unfortunately.

One of our personal heroes this week was in full display yesterday, in both houses of Congress, taking no grief, arrogance, stupidity, or harassment from anyone. That hero is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who not only smacked down preening Republicans looking to grandstand in front of the TV cameras. She even smacked down those right-wing media propagandists who weren't even at the hearings, who've been lying about the attacks in Bengahzi since they happened last September.

We also have to note the heroism today of our American women who serve in combat roles around the world, many of whom have been doing so without official recognition for years. Today, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will remedy that, as he makes official a change in Pentagon policy that will officially open up combat roles to women.

It's not that women haven't already been serving in combat roles in warzones over most of the last twenty years. It's that American women haven't been able to capitalize on their bravery and sometimes heroic service, by climbing some of the military's highest ranks, or by being recognized for their service in certain roles in all branches of the U.S. Armed Services.

After today, those heroes will finally be equal in every legal way, to every other U.S. service member.

The heroism of both Sect. Clinton and our female service members stand out in stark contrast to the cowardice of Republicans in the U.S. House. After months of threatening to effectively tell the creditors of the United States to go to hell unless Congressional Democrats gave in to the demands of Republicans, House Republicans were the ones to run away from their responsibilities on the Federal budget, by caving and pushing off the deadline on the debt ceiling until mid-May.

Not surprisingly, the Republican cowards in the House claimed their caving in was a win. Too bad they weren't courageous enough to stand in front of the media to take questions about their surrender.

Maybe the Republicans in the House were attempting to act like other so-called heroes, hiding from the cameras until they could get their own moments with Oprah or Katie Couric - though we don't think that kind of confessional would have helped the Republicans any more than it did other so-called heroes.