May 28th, 2007
The LA Times has a nice piece on John Edwards and the major themes of his campaign:
WASHINGTON — When Elaine Ellis began her rounds as a New York nursing assistant one morning this spring, she had an improbable companion: John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, who had accepted a union invitation to spend the day with a low-wage worker.
When Ohio steelworkers went on strike last fall to protest a plant closing, who joined their rally? John Edwards.
Next month, low-income survivors of Hurricane Katrina will have another visit from former Sen. Edwards (D-N.C.), who announced his presidential campaign amid the storm rubble of New Orleans.
For more than two years, Edwards has been methodically building his campaign around an issue long shunned by leading Democratic candidates: the plight of the poor and working class. He has backed up his public appearances with unusually detailed proposals to provide universal healthcare, raise taxes on the rich and eliminate poverty over the next 30 years.
“This is a huge moral issue facing the country,” Edwards said in a telephone interview as he headed into a Memorial Day weekend campaign swing through Iowa. “I don’t see in polls that it is a driving issue [for voters], but it is for me.”
Of course, any establishment media article on poverty and politics wouldn’t be complete, er, "balanced," if it didn’t raise the specter of "class warfare":
But Edwards’ 2008 strategy carries risks, in part because it speaks most directly to a slice of the electorate that has notably little political clout. Perhaps the last major presidential candidate to make fighting poverty a central theme was Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) in 1968, before his assassination that June. Some analysts warn that an agenda that might suggest “class warfare” risks alienating middle-class swing voters and moderate Democrats who do not want to revive criticisms that theirs is the party of the poor.
Now, as anyone with sufficient sense knows, there’s "class warfare" going on… just ask Warren E. Buffett:
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
May 27th, 2007
Via TalkingPointsMemo.com, as we suspected, here’s the reason why watching Fox News makes one dumb:
There’s ample evidence that Fox News viewers tend to be surprisingly uninformed about current events. We’re starting to get a better sense as to why that is.
What’s more important: Iraq or Anna Nicole Smith? Depends on which network you’re watching.
According to [the Project for Excellence in Journalism's] first quarter News Coverage Index, “MSNBC and CNN were much more consumed with the war in Iraq than was Fox.”
In daytime, FNC devoted 6 percent of its time to Iraq, and 17 percent of its time to Anna Nicole. For CNN, the mix was 20 percent Iraq, 5 percent Anna; for MSNBC, the mix was 18 percent Iraq, 10 percent Anna.
“Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels. The story, which gained real momentum in mid March, consumed a mere 2% of Fox’s total airtime. CNN devoted twice that percent (4%) and MSNBC four times (8%).”
May 25th, 2007
Just one more illustration of the establishment media talking-heads confirming their status as total asses, via Booman Tribune:
Do me a favor and look at the roll call of the House vote on the Iraq supplemental. You should see the name Harman on this list of ‘Nays’. She’s right there between Hare and Hastings (FL) and it’s pretty clear that the House clerk recorded her vote as a ‘no’. Maybe that is some kind of clerical error, or maybe Jane has forgotten how to vote, but it seems to make a mockery of Smokin’ Joe Klein’s point here:
I was wrong, sadly, last week to say that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would vote for the Iraq supplemental bill. They voted against. As readers here know, I would have voted for the bill. Voting against it means you’re in favor of a precipitous departure from Iraq…
…Yesterday I spoke with Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Ca.) just back from Iraq, who voted for the bill–as did a majority of Democrats who are not running for President. "Look, I would love to have cast a vote against Bush on this. We need a new strategy and I hope we can force one in September," she told me. "But I flew into Baghdad on a troop transport with 150 kids, heading into the field. To vote against this bill was to vote against giving them the equipment, the armor they need. I couldn’t do that."
May 18th, 2007
Some Summer reading to look forward to, from Al Gore — The Assult on Reason:
American democracy is now in danger-not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
TIME has more.
