<$BlogRSDURL$>

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

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Tell Me Again Why Chicago Violence Argued Against Getting The Olympics? 

...one of the almost celebratory notes that a whole host of wingnuts - and, to be honest, a few lefties, too - touted in regard to Chicago's ( and, by direct inference, President Obama's) unsuccessful bid to win the 2016 Summer Olympics was the idea that Chicago is a Failed City where innocent people die at an alarming rate as a result of brutal gang violence totally out of keeping with the spirit of the Olympic Movement...

It turns out, ironically enough, that Chicago's problem may well be that it just isn't sufficiently interesting to be an Olympic venue. Rio de Janeiro, the winner of the contest to be the first venue to host a summer Olympiad during its own winter season, is a much more lively place as far as criminal behavior is concerned. Chicago's punks are clearly going to have to step up their game if they want to be part of some successful effort to secure a future Olympic bid...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:53 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Breaking: Obama Doesn't Travel to Crawford 

...swear to God, I read this AP story and I have no idea where to start. Apparently I am supposed to feel some sort of concern or perhaps outrage or - I don't know - that sort of burbling uncomfortable bloated feeling that eating too many cucumbers can lead to. But I'm conflicted, y'know? I find myself asking one of those fundamental base-line questions that would usually be the sort of query to crop up in the science-based community in which I live:

"So What?"

"Obama travels." "Members of his Cabinet and administration travel." "He and they travel to states that were important to Obama's electoral victory." "That travel costs money." And that's it; that's the context of the story. The Associated Press apparently had neither the interest or the motivation to actually engage in the art of journalism to explore how travel by members of the Obama administration compares to travel by members of other presidential administrations - either recently or dating back to the days of the Wright brothers or in any other context. All we can gather from this bit of "journalism" - and, at that, only by inference based on paying attention during the eight long, grim years of the previous administration - is that Obama hasn't been spending nearly as much down time at Camp David and some Potemkin "Ranch" in Texas as the previous occupant of the White House (trips that cost some unknown amount of money that the AP apparently doesn't have the resources to research)...

It is a disturbing sign of these strange times that the idea of "activist government" earns all sorts of negative press; the mere idea of the current administration being out there on the street (which costs money) pushing a new agenda as opposed to the last administration's practice firing out edicts from behind the impassive, cold, imposing walls of the federal executive bureaucracy is apparently too foreign a concept of the practice of democracy for today's weak facsimile of "journalists" to be able to come to terms with. We've seen this before, of course, when there was actual serious reporting about the outrage generated by the Obama's taking an evening trip to New York to catch a Broadway play, even though there was never any sort of meaningful exploration of the cost of flying the previous president to Crawford to cut brush...

"So what" isn't part of the traditional journalistic "five w's"
, but it works pretty well as a measurement of whether a story actually matters. All we actually know as a result of this AP piece is that Barack Obama doesn't spend most weekends offline at Camp David or some other remote hideout and that his people travel to places, rather than writing letters to places. "Blue state vs. Red state" doesn't matter, mostly because the AP 'reporters' didn't flesh out the travel habits of previous administrations. The only "Breaking News" here is that Obama isn't in Crawford this weekend...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?