leo's blog

Like a made-to-order follow-up to my thoughts on media bias and how the Internet has helped even things up, NPR's On the Media has a wonderful segment on health care reform then and now, called "Rewrite".

The focus is on the differing media environments and the absence in the Nineties of a liberal response mechanism to the "republican echo-chamber". That was one of the reasons that Hillary Care eventually failed. Thanks in part to the rise of the blogosphere, things are far different now.

Conservative historian Niall Ferguson looks at the growing cry to (re-)regulate financial markets and for some reason only thinks of the Seventies:

My concern is that we're going to get the 1970s for fear of the 1930s.

Naturally he's cherry-picking here. In fact, the same regulations also operated in the Fifties and Sixties -- or in other words, the greatest period of economic expansion the country ever knew.

Steven Benen quotes a truly disgusting remark by WaPo Columist, David Broder:

...Democrats really are isolated from the military. Harry Truman had been an artillery captain; John Kennedy and Carter, Navy officers. But Bill Clinton did everything possible to avoid the draft, and Obama, motivated as he was to public service, never gave a thought to volunteering for the military.

I'm getting a bit tired of this 'liberal media' garbage. It's more a reflection of the person saying it and how far they are from the center than any particular orientation of the media outlet in question. I mean, it always seems a bit chilly once you step out of the steam bath.

Josh Silver of Free Press discusses the potential catastrophe of allowing the communication monopolies to cap internet use. He mentions Congressman Eric Massa's reaction:

Yesterday, Rep. Massa told the Philadelphia Inquirer he is looking for a Republican co-sponsor for the bill: 'This is bigger than a college kid surfing the Internet. Anything that limits access to the basic Internet is a threat to the economy."

A number of people are pointing to this article about hard times in the credit card industry:

For the banks, the economics of the credit card business are increasingly troubling. As the recession has dragged on, cardholders have sharply reduced spending. New customers with strong credit histories are increasingly hard to find.

So today, Obama's weekly address was about ending abuses by the credit card companies while the Republican Response, given by Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), was about Gitmo and scaremongering (more here).

It's hard to imagine a clearer contrast between the two parties and why one is in the majority and the other is on the ropes.

All day long, WBBM Radio played Sen. Orin Hatch's comment that 'empathy', which is one of Obama's criteria for selecting a Supreme Court justice, was just "a code word for an activist judge." All day long, they played this.

The worst possible outcome of our current financial mess is to end up with the exact same financial institutions that we started out with.

Obama's response to a question about Glass-Steagall in an interview he gave to the NYT last week didn't make me feel too confident:

Not so much a comment on Obama's First 100 Days as a comment on the accuracy of observations on First 100 Days in general...

From the column 'Report from Washington' by Walter Trohan, Chicago Tribune (4/30/1969):

The first hundred days of Richard Milhous Nixon find him standing taller in the eyes of his countrymen and looming larger on the world horizon than most observers, and even many of his admirers, had expected....