A fading sheen?

Now that the Democratic nomination has wound down and Obama has emerged as the victor, the main stream media, driven by the hard right (especially the self avowed McCain "surrogate" Faux News) have started attacking Obama's positions. The most common attacks are the blatant lies - the "Obama is a secret Muslim" and "Obama says high gas prices are a good thing." What is more insidious, though, are the attempts to portray Obama's long held positions as "flip-flops."

Julie over at Momocrats has a great series of posts (starting here) addressing a few key issues. As she points out: on the death penalty he has consistently been against killing innocents, but not against capital punishment in general; on gun control - "I think it's important for us to recognize that we've got a tradition of . . . gun ownership . . . We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respect the Second Amendment."; FISA I will address later in this post.

Other attacks like this include NAFTA - his position has been that we need to renegotiate NAFTA, not drop it completely. His problem with NAFTA has been that there are no environmental protections and no worker protections. This allows manufacturing jobs that paid well and were union jobs here in America to be sent to Mexico and Canada where the workers can be paid less and there are fewer environmental protections. He wants to fix these issues; he does not want to unilaterally drop out.

Then there is Iraq. Obama has, since 2003, been against Iraq. But now you are seeing people attack him saying he doesn't intend to leave and in the same breath attack him for being a "cut and run Democrat." They can't have it both ways. Obama's stance has been "We have to be more careful getting out than we were careless getting in." This means that while he intends to pull most of our troops out in 12-18 months, he is not going to do something stupid that leaves us in a worse position than we already are in.

Just this past weekend we had yet another instance of this. General Wesley Clark said "Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president." On its surface, it's true. However, McCain did serve in the military, achieving the rank of captain. This is a record of service that, as Obama has said for months, deserves our recognition. He has also consistently, even through the primary campaign, been against personal, ad hominem attacks. Thus, when he rejected General Clark's attack, he was not flip-flopping or throwing Clark under the bus, he was staying consistent with his message of bringing politics out of the gutter.

The last of these I want to focus on is the FISA legislation. In general, I am against these reforms. However, I have not read the legislation myself and I don't know all of the reforms it will be implementing. The one that I am most strongly against is the telecom immunity clause that will ensure no one is held responsible for completely ignoring the Constitution during Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. When this came up for vote a few months ago, Obama voted against cloture and co-sponsored an amendment with Sen. Dodd to strip the immunity clause. It has come back up for vote in the Senate and this time Obama did not vote on the cloture vote (neither did McCain or Clinton). He has, however said he will continue to push to remove the immunity. Without having researched this bill better, I can't make a complete judgment on his general support of the bill. As far as whether he has changed his position, that is harder to say; he still is fighting against the immunity, but it appears he has weakened his position on the bill at large.

Now all of this does not mean he hasn't changed position on things. The most talked about change has been his stance on public financing in his campaign. Back in 2007, he did say that as long as his Republican counterpart chose to accept public financing, so would he. This clearly is not happening. To explain this, he has said that with 1.7 million donors nationwide, his campaign is being financed by the public, but that ignores some of the other catches tied in with federal public financing. Personally, I am mixed on this. As an idealist, I would like for the public financing system to work and allow good campaigns. However, the other side is best summed up in a cartoon BAC posted a week ago:

There is also the issue of Israel. Throughout his career he has remained fairly neutral on this. However, after securing the nomination he spoke before AIPAC and came down very strongly pro-Israel. This really disappointed me. It weakens his ability to be a fair arbiter of any peace deal between Israel and Palestine. As of yet, I have not heard him address the issues raised in this speech.

I think Julie's final assessment is very accurate. Obama's positions are much more nuanced than a 10 second sound bite. This is something that draws me to him because it breaks away from the "with us or against us" mentality of the past eight years. But it is much harder to convey to the wider public and can be has been used against him. What should be the MSM's job, conveying the facts of the issues, has now fallen to us, the bloggers and grass roots activists.

How the Media Got Wright Wrong

Florida, Iraq War, George Bush, Swftboats, Hannity, Coulter, Rove - you would think with a record like this of lie after lie people would start to catch on that Faux News has issues with telling the truth. But no, time and again the MSM goes back to them and repeats their talking points. This time it is Sen. Barack Obama and his former pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. who have drawn their ire.

All of you, those not living in caves, by now have seen the clips this "news" agency has put out on the reverend. All of you have seen media source after media source parrot the idea that Barack must harbor, exclusively, these 10 second sound bites and hate America and white people. And we, as a country, have eaten it up. If it's on TV it must be true, right?

But any honest journalist, especially one dealing with politics, knows that context is king. Just watching Colbert's "Better Know a District" segment will show you what a sound bite can be used for. You can make anyone sound like the biggest idiot or racist bigot if you get just the right 10 seconds. Yet the "journalists" at media outlet after media outlet failed to acknowledge this most basic fact.

Fortunately, Rev. Wright's former church has started a YouTube channel with the full sermons. Snippets like "America's chickens have come home to roost" are turned into sermons decrying violence as a response to violence and a call to love our enemies. "God damn America" is turned to God is a god of love who is against oppression.

I leave you now with the actual post 9-11 sermon Wright gave to Trinity United:

New Hampshire Follow-up

Yeah, I know its a couple days late, but I listen to most of my news a day later, just to let it ferment a little. Congratulations to Senators Clinton and McCain. They both fought hard for their victories.

The thing that gets me about this result though, is that the pundits are all acting like it is a complete surprise. With idiotic statements like "No one predicted this would happen" it's no wonder most people would rather watch Howie Mandel smiling like a chipmunk. They themselves predicted exactly this outcome (on the Democratic side) not 10 days before. On the Republican side they were even more accurate. I too predicted exactly this (yay being vague) not 36 hours before voting started.

"Oh, but the polls didn't show this." Two problems with this: 1) Polls only reflect opinions up to the last time they were taken, they can't reflect 11th hour events, like the harsh, sexist media backlash at Hillary's emotional plea. 2) The polls weren't used properly. New Hampshire voters, if they are registered independents, can vote for either party. According to the voters themselves, independents who were Obama supporters, voted for McCain because they expected Obama would win without their vote, but they didn't want Romney to win.

Maybe pollsters need to learn a bit of physics. According to the Uncertainty Principal (sorry, I've been listening to A Brief History of Time so I have been hearing a lot about this along with a lot of other brain hurting things from Hawking), you can either know where a particle is or where it's going, never both at the same time because the act of observing changes the particle. I have the feeling polling does the same thing. You can't take a poll without affecting the data.

Anyway, to throw my hat back into the pundit ring, in South Carolina I see Obama narrowly over Clinton and Edwards (where those two wind up depends on whether or not Edwards's remark Tuesday made it down there...) and similar in Nevada (I will be better able to say something after the debate down there) with not much being decided until February 5th at the earliest. The problem with predicting this is that most Democrats I hear from would be happy with either candidate and so it comes down to last minute, "who do I like more right now?" voting.

The Republican side seems much more interesting, at least from a horse race and ideological point of view. In SC, I see Huckabee edging out McCain with Thomson finally starting to make a bit more than a half-hearted appearance (don't know if it is going to push him to a third place finish though). 9iul1an1 (Thank you Run From Fire, I hope you don't mind me borrowing this.) Will start blipping the radar, but not show much until a second or third place finish in Florida. I see McCain more likely than not winning in FL and if second goes to Huckabee, it will be a very interesting following couple weeks afterwards. What I see the Republican race boiling down to are conservative centrists coalescing around the McCain/9iul1an1 side of the party and the evangelical populists around Huckabee. The way this turns out could redefine the Republican party (or at least finish defining it) or possibly even lead to a cromulent third party.

Freedom of the Press blogs

Two judiciary committee members sent an opinion piece to several leading major newspapers. Among the papers approached were the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Miami Herald. None of these publications opted to print it.

Why? Because it was the justification for proceeding with hearings on the impeachment of Richard Chaney. It appears that corporate media is afraid to talk about such proceedings in anything but disparaging tones.

Oh, but I'm sure there's nothing serious going on. Just because the corporate owners of these publications are making money hand over fist because of initiatives this president and VP have pushed through wouldn't influence them. And I'm sure Chaney wouldn't threaten to cut off access to these newspapers' reporters, right? And anyway, these corporate interests wouldn't influence the newspapers' editorial boards.

Anyway, since the "mainstream" media doesn't have the guts to talk about this, at least we now have a way to share this information outside of them. Thank you Common Dreams for reporting on it and thank you to GMB for sharing it further. Please, any readers (the 1-2 of you out there) reading this, share this with your friends too.

A little of column A, but also some of column B

BAC over at Yikes pointed me to this:

During a Press Club event David Gregory, of NBC News, complained about the polarized nature of politics and how it affects them. When asked later by Hellen Thomas who he thought caused the polarization, he blamed it largely on the internet and the bloggers. While the soapbox nature of blogging does contribute to this problem, it was not the originator, and definitely not the only, and probably not the greatest contributor to the problem.

The polarization first started long before the internet became popular. Rush Limbaugh has not changed his format since he started up in 1988. Bill Clinton wasn't attacked time and again by bloggers. The Christian Right wasn't started by bloggers. George W. Bush is not, to my knowledge, a blogger. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and the like were not, until recently, bloggers. Rove didn't use the internet originally. Michael Moore's primary medium isn't the internet.

What caused the polarized nature of politics today is the way the media classifies everything as a black or white issue where only one party can be right. It doesn't want to make its viewers think by explaining what each side is saying and what the truth is, it just wants to sell you a pack of Bud, a Happy Meal, and get you to watch the next show. When you are given only the back and forth and not any of the facts that the different sides are both manipulating, people are left to figure out what is true on their own. They will then side with whichever one they are already a part of, and since they are never given a real consensus on the facts, they can always shelter in their own world.

Blogs just allow this to continue. Many blogs, especially political blogs, are used, as I described above, as a soap box. The problem is that everyone has a soap box and few people get off long enough to look for whats really going on. They change from being a way to share your ideas to a way to reinforce your narrow view. I hope to go outside of that on this blog. I will attempt to research, and give you access to my research, my topics (when its not a pure opinion piece). I also ask that, if I am wrong, that you, my readers, show me where I went wrong and help me correct it.

So, David Gregory, you are not correct about where it started, you would have been right, though, to have said that the internet magnifies it.