Fund the government until January 15…extend the debt ceiling until February 7…budget conference for fiscal negotiations later this year…keep sequestration intact (from National Review Online).
The news media under President Obama has been proving that it’s not going to be very much protection against tyranny, unless it comes in a retro fascist costume from the early Twentieth Century. A man targeted by the Obama Administration as a fall-guy for Benghazi disappears into prison for a year? Not much noise. The administration drives people off federal land, even out of their homes, to prove a political point? Hardly worthy of note.
The one-sided perspective extends even to poll results about blame for the government shutdown. Tom Kludt phrases it in the terms of the media’s common wisdom: “Republicans continue to absorb the bulk of the blame.”
That’s not an accurate statement. The poll in question didn’t ask respondents to pick a side; it asked about approval and disapproval. Yes, 74% disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of the issue, but 61% disapprove of the Democrats’. Much of the difference, I’d propose, has simply to do with the skewed way in which current events are presented to the population. (How many Americans know, for example, that Republicans in the House have voted eleven times to fund the government?)
Much of it also has to do with the lack of specificity for “approval.” The “liberal” category’s view of the Democrats is comparable with the “very conservative” category’s view of the Republicans. It would be difficult for the Democrats to take any harder line, however, while many conservatives disapprove of the Republicans because of a presumed weakness and likelihood to cave.
Most people don’t desire to swim against the tide, especially when complicated subjects blend with overheated rhetoric, as in politics. It would be more accurate to say, of the poll, that Americans are blaming both sides for the shutdown, but that wouldn’t serve the political ends of the people doing the reporting.
Mark Curtis of WLNE-TV (ABC 6) is reporting that the required number of signatures needed to trigger a recall election of Exeter Town Council President Arlene Hicks have been verified, while “signature verification on the other three targeted Council members continues”.
From tearful, public remorse to lead sponsor of the supplemental tax bill.
It may be one of the hoarier clichés about the mainstream media, but it’s no less true, for that, to observe that an event like this would be major news if it happened under a Republican president (particularly one perceived as some variation of conservative):
As Twitchy reported, citizens attending the Million Vets March in Washington, D.C., Sunday tore down Barrycades at several memorials. The crowd then picked up the Barrycades and began transporting them to the White House.
Let’s state that objectively: U.S. military veterans are protesting the Obama administration’s decision to actively expend resources to close down and close off federal land in order to amplify Americans’ experience with the federal government shutdown by performing an act of civil disobedience and bringing the barricades to the White House.
This is the sort of thing that ought to wind up in Life magazine retrospectives and history books’ sidebars to give the sense of the decade. Time will tell whether it will, but given the media’s practice of pre-writing history to serve ideological ends, I’m not confident.
Justin Katz and Bob Plain talk government shutdown and extremists on 10 News Conference.
605 signatures calling for the recall of four town councilors have been submitted in Exeter. The motivating issue is the town council majority’s desire to end the process by which Exeter residents can obtain firearms permits from the town clerk.
Here’s a quick rundown of the numbers out from the latest Brown University Taubman Center poll of registered voters, conducted between Oct. 2–5, 2013.
1. In a 4-way gubernatorial preference poll, the results are:
Barricades blocking the Roger Williams National Memorial in Providence, Rhode Island, offer an early lesson of what can happen when we forget that the government and the people are not the same thing.
I slipped, again, and read today’s Froma Harrop column. Here’s the breezy way in which a pro Projo columnist characterizes the legal and political debate around ObamaCare:
Nothing the Tea Party people demand can’t be had through the normal political process. It happens that a duly elected House and Senate passed Obamacare. And when asked, the U.S. Supreme Court said it’s cool with it.
That’s that, sneering away so much legitimate argument that a reader remembers why he’d determined her columns not worth the effort. The “Tea Party people” are “tyrants.” Condescendingly: “They are martyrs, you see” — out there in their filthy, suspect difference.
Harrop should read an excellent column by Andrew McCarthy, who argues that the passage of ObamaCare was pure unconstitutional “fraud” and will be back before the Court on additional grounds. For the likes of Harrop, one senses, the intellectual validity of a law is chiefly determined by whether or not they like the result.
So, she insists, the tyrants are not those who control most of government, who managed to push through an ideological boondoggle as law because there was nobody with power to enforce the rules, and who are now putting up absurd barriers and shutting down businesses deliberately to cause people pain, while proving the “most closed, control-freak administration” ever (even in the eyes of a New York Times reporter). The tyrants are not the ones who apparently used the IRS and other agencies to target the Tea Party for engaging in “the normal political process.”
Rather, in Harrop’s view, the tyrants are ordinary people with the effrontery to utilize our system’s deliberate protections for political minorities. Kinda makes you worry what’s to come as our betters forget that old yack about sticking up for process and remembering that we’re all Americans, doesn’t it?
Readers will note that today’s Providence Journal had space to inform Rhode Islanders about a comment related to same-sex marriage made by Pennsylvania’s governor. (For those who don’t know, in most cases, Rhode Islanders would have to travel through three other states to go see a friend in Pennsylvania.)
Rhode Islanders who expand their reading lists beyond their “paper of record” will discover such stories as:
A media industry that truly saw itself as the guardian of the people would be all over these outrages. One that is not all over them seems more likely to see itself as the guardian of a particular political party and a particular president.
The Obama Administration is spending taxpayer funds to actively block off monuments and tourist attractions:
This indefensible activity is progressive community organizing, and it’s what government becomes when the people in power are statists who define the nation by its government.
Psst. Republican politicians in Rhode Island. Can we talk quietly? You really need to up your strategic game.
Take this non-story about the gun raffle. The false narrative that the national Democrats and mainstream media have painted on a specific firearm is an incredibly sloppy production; you can see all of the traced lines. After the Navy Yard shooting, the media proclaimed that the AR-15 was “back in the news,” but it was only so because they had mistakenly reported it as one of the weapons used. NBC was finally reduced to reporting that the shooter had handled one at a range recently.
Likewise, the Providence Journal’s online headline that you’re “under fire for gun raffle” is only the case because reporter Kathy Gregg called people for comment. She set up the firing squad. Caving to this is like clearing takeoff for the plane that’s going to drop a bomb on you.
I get the sense that you aren’t spending much time hanging out with your base across the state, because if you were, you’d see that they’re dejected and demoralized and rapidly concluding that being active in the public sphere isn’t worth the effort. You better do something about it fast. You’re about to enter the election year playing field only to find that your team is limited to those who are there by habit.
In any standoff, doesn’t it take two to tango? And if you think it’s ridiculous to hold up the debt ceiling in order to get changes to the Affordable Care Act, let me ask this. If the Republicans simply approved the debt ceiling increase and then minutes later said, “Ok, let’s talk about changes to ACA now” what do you think would be the reaction from the Democrats? Yep, crickets. I hate horse-trading as much as anyone else but unfortunately, this is how it works.
So Congressional Republicans put forward a plan to fund government and not ObamaCare (we will fund if). Senate Democrats changed the bill to fund government and ObamaCare (we won’t fund unless). The president says he “will not negotiate.” And the Providence Journal gives its front page story this highly irresponsible lede: “House GOP rebels stand firm on pledge to shut down government over Obamacare.”
Not surprisingly, a conservative, James Taranto, has the more reasonable take:
What we have here is not a hostage situation but a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. If both sides cooperate, the result is unsatisfactory. If both sides defect, the result is catastrophic.
Seven takeaways from last evening’s discussion billed as a “very respectful discussion with two of the most respectful union leadership figures in the state”, Rhode Island National Education Association Executive Director Robert Walsh and former Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers President Richard Ferruccio, hosted by the Roosevelt Society:
7. At one point during the evening, Mr. Walsh described himself and Mr. Ferruccio as pretty well representing the two poles of the Democratic party tent. This was probably best illustrated when Lee Ann Sennick asked the panelists about the immigration issue….
Americans support conservative/Republican policies, but distortions in the media, entertainment, and cultural fields lead them still to prefer progressives/Democrats.
Both Rhode Island’s languishing economy and the fading strength of its paper of record may result from a lack of hope and interest, which result from a lack of any real competitive battle for the direction of the state.
The image of town hall free speech in America may be shifting from the Norman Rockwell classic Americana.
Linking the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity with the Republican Party may at some point backfire on the interests of entrenched local powers, such as the labor unions and the newspaper reporters mixed up with them.
The first 10 News Conference segment focused on (disagreements about) Governor Chafee’s time in office.
The tenets of Progressivism, as pursued by President Barack Obama and Congressman Jim Langevin, appear to be of the sort that has caused the state of Rhode Island to regress.
A symptom of Rhode Island & America’s problem: everybody’s first question after the Chafee announcement is the effect on politics, not on policy.
Quadrupling down on Rhode Island; finding the American-statist antidote in the Ocean State; school choice as the real civil rights battle of the day; who gets media “support” and why.
War policy that unites the Left and Right and economic policy that favors the 1% raises the question whether there’s any rationale for supporting the president’s administration beyond rank partisanship.
I’ve been trying to figure out if we have any state leadership here in RI. When we have a Governor who gets embroiled in what to call an evergreen adorned in lights in December and a General Assembly who is more concerned about what appetizer they want to endorse, I’m trying to figure out if they have any ability to lead. Apparently, some states have it figured out.
A Providence Journal article about a toll arson is more significant as evidence that the pants of the people tasked to run and to inform the state are on fire.
Republican diversity; John Galt moves to the Ocean State; RI’s employment backslide; “how could it come to that?”
The Rhode Island unemployment rate went in the wrong direction again in July as did the number of jobs in the state. What did our General Assembly do this past session to fix this years-old problem?
IRS targeting continues; a handbook for manipulating the public; playing games with government investment-backstopping; healthcare on the long slide down to government destruction.