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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, June 26, 2009

So Maybe This Is What Happens In The Winger BlogWorld 

...some stories simply do not have enough meat on their bones. This is one of them. I personally can't help but indulging in fanciful imagining of some tragic incident where the guy wants to write a blog post blaming Obama for Mark Sanford's Argentinian tryst and his wife tells him that's a stupid thing to do because Rush covered it already and that what he should post about is how Obama is going to put us all in internment camps once he gets the new Census data. He calls her an idiot because, he says, Michelle Bachmann is already all over that one...

One insulting accusation about a lack of creativity leads to another, and that bag of Cheetos is laying there on the desk next to the keyboard.

Mom finally gets tired of all the wild violent noises coming from the basement between her boy and that evil gold-digger witch he hooked up with and brought home when the bottom fell out of the fast food middle-shift manager job market. She calls 911...

OK, so the reality may well be far more prosaic than this, but given the stuff we see coming out of wingers these days, how can you ever be sure...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

ZOMG!! Can You Feel The OUTRAGE!?! (Dana Milbank Edition) 

...the basic story line as to what will now apparently go down in the annals of White House Correspondent Outrage as the "Blogger Stab In The Heart Of Journalistic Integrity" is pretty well understood, so there's no need to replow that ground. What is interesting, however, is the absolute outrage...OUTRAGE, I say, at this perfidious example of the White House stacking the deck when it comes to what questions might be asked at a presidential press conference...

The only problem is that the face of this outrage - perhaps even the only spokesperson for it from any reputable news outlet, in fact - seems to be Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. To be sure, he is more than doing his part to cover for apparent White House sycophants like Jake Tapper, who - unlike Milbank - is actually a current member of the White House press corp and yet somehow missed the opportunity to mention this outrage in his ABC News blog. Milbank, on the other hand, has turned his outrage as a former White House Correspondent into a cottage industry, expressing that outrage not only here, but also on this WaPo blogpost and - to make sure you get the message - in the above referenced NPR "All Things Considered" piece...

What seems to actually be powering this powerful outrage (which did get hashed over a bit at today's White House briefing - about 2/3rds of the way down in the transcript) is the specter of someone who is not a Villager in good standing being allowed to ask a question, rather than whether the person asking the question was planted. There is all sorts of high-minded talk about "perception" and 'scripting' and such, but the real burr under their saddles is the fact that the White House encouraged someone with actual subject-specific knowledge to come in and ask a question that may well matter to people outside the village...

These are the same people, mind you, who served as little more than handmaidens and stenographers to the recent and unlamented Bush administration until his approval ratings were so much lower than used car salesmen and personal injury lawyers that it was finally safe to chew on the press secretary's leg just a bit. The damage that Bushco wreaked on us and our country was already done by then, of course, but that doesn't seem to matter so much to the current and former White House Correspondents who failed both us and their own self-averred status as "The Fourth Estate" back in the day when they had the chance to actually matter. What matters anymore is that a stinking blogger showed up to ask a rather tough question from an Iranian citizen (which wasn't, by the by, all that much different than the question asked by FAUX News' Major Garrett) and that the White House encouraged that DFH blogger to be at the presser to ask that question that it neither vetted or knew beforehand and that Obama ACTUALLY CALLED ON HIM (insert your own version of 'ZOMG' here). And that, in the MSM world, is WRONG...apparently for some reason or other...

Milbank makes sure to take pains to invoke the name of Jeff Gannon for reasons that he would undoubtedly be able to provide a plausible-sounding explanation, regardless of the fact that there isn't any discernible connection or identifiable equal sign that could connect those two things out here in the real world. That, in itself, is probably instructive as to what the complaint of the White House correspondent Villagers, both past and present, are all about...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:05 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

On Congress Members Health Insurance...One More Time...From The Top 

...for the last several days, I've seen posters and commenters at various lefty blogs raging at the refusal of so-called "moderate" Democratic Senators threatening to bring down any efforts at health insurance reform by saying in one way or another "Let's take away their FREE health care and see how they like it then, the smarmy bastids!!?"

Stirring 'to the ramparts' rhetoric, that; wrong, but truly stirring. Let's revisit the health insurance program offered to Honorable Members of the Congress of the United States one last time, shall we?

Members of the Congress of the United States are eligible to enroll in the very same health benefits plan that is available to all those other two million federal employees; it is called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), and it is generally a program that offers health insurance provided by private companies - some of whom are strange creatures created by the program itself but private companies nonetheless - and that are paid for by both an employer and employee contribution. Many of these plans offer extremely limited dental and vision benefits, but those limitations can be overcome by the purchase of a 'rider' policy (all of which is paid for by the employee...or Senator) that will offer more generous coverage in those areas...

This is the 2009 premium/employer contribution structure for Senators, Representatives, and grumpy foresters for the more prominent plans. Based on over three decades of observation, my take is that this is not all that dissimilar to many private employers' insurance plans. Yes, the 'employer contribution' in this case is payed for by taxpayers. On the other hand, some portion of the price you pay for a variety of goods and services from the private sector represents the same sort of employer contribution. The main difference between that overhead cost and your tax payments covering your Senator's government contribution lies in your understanding of whether or not buying an American-made kitchen appliance (Frigidare or Maytag, for example) is actually different than buying new bridges or paving overlays or pothole patching or aircraft carriers or elements of relief and respite for the least amongst us offered by a host of social programs. We are the employers, and we contribute to the health care plans of those who work for us as they do things on our behalf...or not, as the case may be, but there are some straight-up differences between the products and services provided by industry and those provided by government...

The bottom line of this little screed is simple and - I must confess, because of the reality of life - self-serving. Members of Congress do not have FREE health care; they pay a premium and there is an employer contribution (albeit one that is made courtesy of taxpayer funding). Members of Congress contribute less of their gross pay to that health insurance program than most other federal employees, but that is a function of their pay grade and isn't really different from any number of private sector companies that offer health care plans for employees. The problems we are seeing with so-called "moderate" Democratic Senators fighting against some sort of public option is all about politics and not about any "free" health care that they supposedly enjoy. It's about insurance industry lobbyists and the MSM echo chamber that gives soapboxes to Republicans even though no credible polling data suggests that there is any public support for the Republican desire to torpedo anything that looks like health care reform. It's not about "free health care" for members of Congress...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:07 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 22, 2009

When To Spill The Beans 

...I gotta confess, when I first heard over the weekend that New York Times reporter David Rohde and Afghan reporter Tahir Ludin had managed to escape from their Taliban captors in Pakistan's North Waziristan region on Friday, my first thought was "Hot Damn!! Excellent!!" My second thought was "Wait! What?"...

An understandable reaction on my part, I suppose, because it turns out that I was only one of pretty much a whole planet full of people who didn't know that David Rohde was even missing, much less a captive of the Taliban. This episode does raise some intriguing questions about the role of the media, but - sadly - none of those questions appear to have any sort of coherent basis. On the one hand, there are questions about the fundamental trustworthiness of the MSM in the face of a breathtaking conspiracy on the part of no less than 40 major news organizations - along with our own government - to conceal the very fact of Rohde's capture. This particular viewpoint is offered and debated by Kelly McBride, an instructor of journalistic ethics (I promise, God as my witness, that this is not considered to be an oxymoron) at the Poynter Institute in this NPR interview. Listen to the audio, because there is a lot more meat on the bones than the print teaser suggests...

Another question, as raised by a pundit at the conservative National Post, goes to that whole "goose and gander" thing, asking why it was so important to conceal the identity, not to mention the simple fact, of a reporter hostage, not just this one time but as a reprise of an episode last year involving CBC reporter Mellissa Fung when the same sort of restraint and secrecy wasn't applied equally to other hostages who were either not "big time" mainstream journalists or part of that particular club at all...

There is clearly room to find a bit of concordance with both of these positions, if only because they bring up serious issues about the role of the media in this world in which we are sentenced to live. For anyone who hasn't decided to adopt the role of barnacle on the hull of American life, the twin ideas of media secrecy and media selectivity in reporting these stories can be powerful motivators for reinforcing the disturbing viewpoint that there simply isn't any agent out there looking out for any of us little guys who don't matter. Rather than engaging in a media blackout if any of us were to fall into the clutches of some evil terrorist cabal, we would be safe in laying a bet on the prospect of bulky trucks driving all over the flower beds and crushing the sprinkler system as the cable networks fought for space in our front yards to bring the latest "Breaking News" to their viewers...

Then, of course, there is as always that third question raised by those who simply can't look beyond their own personal agenda to be able to come to grips with what all of this is about anyway. This is a good example of that bizarre non sequitur argument that says, in effect, "Oh, sure, you can keep a secret now, but what about when torturing helpless detainees was necessary to defend the Homeland from Terra? Hunh, Bub? What about that?" Fortunately for the rest of us who long ago started looking for a quiet, peaceful, isolated South Pacific island that could serve as a Neocon repopulation center, Lewis Carroll covered this ground a century and a half ago with the Mad Hatter so we don't have to...

There is a point, even though certain neocon commentators can't seem to claw their way to it, to all of this, and that is 'when - and why - do you spill the beans on a situation like the one David Rohde was in. I haven't decided where exactly I find myself on this, although I do have to confess to leaning toward the "why not tell the story" crowd, if only because I have always hated the MSM's insistence on prying into the darkest, most desperate corners of everybody else's lives at the worst possible moment and wonder why they should be accorded some special privilege be spared those moments. This is clearly an "ethics panel" moment for the MSM to examine just exactly when or whether they spill the beans...

Wake me when the MSM gets beyond its own sense of exceptionalism and makes that moment happen, OK?
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:30 PM 0 comments

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Today's "Why Am I Not Surprised" Moment 

...shrouded back there somewhere in the mists of history, there was a time (in fact, up through 2004) when a person who finished second in the race for the presidency of the United States would take some time off from the public stage. It was almost a form of tradition that a candidate who had been repudiated by American voters - or, as was Al Gore's case in 2000, a 5-vote majority of Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices, even though American voters had actually repudiated his opponent - would step back, assume a low profile, and abjure offers to share his opinion on the day's events for some decent interval of a year or two or three. It was an understandable tradition, given that the loser's judgement had already been assessed and found wanting (Al Gore excepted, of course), so a failed candidate could easily be excused for wondering why he should bother. Clearly, when it comes to the MSM and the most recent loser, John McCain, that tradition is as dead as the bundling board...

Not satisfied to simply rest after his star turn leading the charge to make a bad situation in Iran worse, McCain today was granted another opportunity by the MSM to offer his plan for how to escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula beyond the breaking point. His plan isn't all that surprising, since McCain comes from that bellicose branch of the Republican party that seeks conflict not because of confused, underinformed and misguided neoconservative Pax Americana theories but because of a visceral urge to blow things up...

Maybe his war jones is getting all cranked up here because the US Naval vessel that may well be tasked to intercept the North Korean freighter Kang Nam is the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer DDG-56, otherwise known as USS McCain. Or, who knows, maybe he doesn't even know that little factoid and is just running on the same muscular philosophical war-fuel that has informed his world-view for his entire public life. Make no mistake about this; the ol' Maverick has never been opposed to military conflict for it's own sake and has only been a 'maverick' in the eyes of his own party over the terms rather than the fact of use of military force. His early-career opposition to Reagan's foray into Lebanon was all about objectives and his objections to W's war in Iraq were about tactics rather than about actual strategic issues...

In that internal world of his own construct, it may be that McCain is actually becoming a bit of a softy as he ages. The wildly absurd threats of retaliation by the North Korean regime have been sounding far more like the pronouncements of Henery Hawk from those old Foghorn LeghornLooney Toons episodes than the statements of a government grounded in any particular sense of reality. Given all that, why not just sink the damned ship if you believe you have "hard evidence" of cargo violating U.N. resolutions? After all, in Big John's mind, we had "hard evidence" that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction and that all the people of Iraq would welcome us with open arms and petal-strewn streets if only we would remove Saddam's oppressive yoke of subjugation from its collective shoulders, and that all panned out just the way he called it, right?

What McCain is advocating here is calling North Korea's bluff, because that's what you do when you think you are the biggest, meanest dog on the porch and you don't really care all that much who gets bitten in the ensuing melee. I am not surprised at all by his suggested approach to dealing with this issue because that's the sort of solution John McCain would be expected to give to any sort of foreign policy crisis, but a couple of questions still remain: whatever happened to the days when the guy who got his presidential candidate butt kicked - in part for advocating just this sort of solution to a testy foreign policy issue - looked in the mirror and saw a guy who didn't really need to be contributing to this conversation at this moment? And whatever happened to the days when the MSM had the decency and fundamental respect for us little people to ignore the clamoring voices of people like McCain that we so recently firmly rejected at both the Congressional and presidential level as the sort of candidates that we wanted to be speaking in our collective name?
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:05 PM 0 comments

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