Logic is not the Point: Political Savvy & Emotional Intelligence Are

On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin concluded Sarah Palin's speech was much better than Joe Biden's. The democrat party and Biden have already proved they will have trouble knowing how to handle her without descending into sneering condescension.

Cogent analysis from Tom Shales TV Review column.

"

Palin gave the impression of an entire party rolling up its sleeves and digging in, never mind whether some of its arguments were illogical or shot full of holes, or even blatantly ridiculous, as when she portrayed the party as pro-environment and Giuliani earlier portrayed it as feminist-minded.

She proved herself in the great arena; that's what counts politically. Nobody could watch that speech and still consider her a joke, no matter how flimsy her credentials and qualifications may seem on paper. The joke, it seems, is on those who'd been laughing at her. Last night the laughing ended -- and the cheering began.

"

We'll see if the Obama campaign can adapt. It's clear the democratic party still hasn't. They're making the same tired defensive, deer-in-headlights whiney complaining statements they've always made or completely inappropriate off-base ones that show how condescending they are toward women candidates in general and Palin in specific. Call it a major deficit of emotional intelligence.

I don't mind seeing them get their butts kicked around for a while. I can imagine some well-earned schadenfreude and a few knowing smiles on the part of Hillary Clinton. Hillary's earned a well-deserved rest while the circus plays out. The dems threw her overboard — or under the proverbial bus — I think she's earned sitting on the sidelines from here on out, watching for as long as she wants. It's Obama's responsibility to earn the votes.

But ultimately I would not like to see Team McCain elected in November. It's also richly entertaining to see the Republicans become more wedded to their right wing anti-science, anti-choice, compulsory pregnancy, theocratic wing nuts.

Exhibit # 2 that the Dem & Media Elites Still "Don't Get It"

CNN is dicussing that the totally pathetic ineffectual, emabarrassing leader of the democrat senate, Senator Harry Reid's office issued a response characterizing Sarah Palin's speech as "shrill." Campbell Brown pointed out that no male speakers or leaders are ever called 'shrill.'

Paul Begalla is now showing that he doesn't 'get it' either. Donna Brazile is now defending Paul Begala.

These elite snobs are going to help the Republicans prove their case.

They truly have not learned the lessons of the past 28 years — which Bill and Hillary knew well when it comes to middle America, not the far left. Winning a primary is not the same as winning a national election.

This should remain interesting for a while.

Palin is impressive. The pundits are not. The democrat party is not. The republikkkan party is not.

It's still the sexist elitist media bias, stupid. Along with the obamatons and democrap pigs who are out in full force at The Fix.

Best Palin Zinger:
"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities." OUCH.

Media Critique Worth Reading: Is CNN the Corrupt News Network?

Regarding Media / Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times

CNN: Corrupt News Network

A self-serving agenda was set for the Republican presidential debates.

Tim Rutten
Regarding Media

December 1, 2007

THE United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?

In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally suitable to play the political role the Democratic and Republican parties recently have conceded it.

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. We've got a pretty good fix concerning what's on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center's most recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday's debate.

HERE'S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those questions as their most worrisome issue. As anybody who has looked at their 401(k) or visited a gas pump would expect, that aggregate figure has increased dramatically since Pew started polling in January. Back then, for example, concerns over the war outpaced economic anxieties by fully 8 to 1. By contrast, just 6% of the survey's national sample said that immigration was the most important electoral issue. Moreover, that number hasn't changed in a statistically meaningful way since the first of the year. In other words, more than nine out of 10 Americans think something matters more than immigration in this presidential election.

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday's debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. So, what's good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corruption, and it's why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal -- and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed. That's particularly true because that same Pew poll reported findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

According to this most recent poll, a substantial number of Americans believe the surge is working. As Pew summarized their findings, "While Iraq remains a deeply polarizing issue across party lines, there has been improvement in how both Democrats and Republicans view the war. At the lowest point in February, barely half of Republicans (51%) said things were going well. Today, 74% of Republicans say the same. And while Democrats remain far more skeptical than Republicans, the proportion of Democrats expressing a positive view of the Iraq effort has doubled since February (from 16% to 33%).

"Independents' assessments of how the military effort is going remain far closer to the views of Democrats than of Republicans. Currently, 41% of independents offer a positive assessment, while half say things are not going well. In February, 26% of independents expressed a positive view of the situation in Iraq."

Those are significant swings of opinion, yet the poll also found that more than half of Americans still favor withdrawing American troops. That disconnect is a real issue for the GOP candidates, all but one of whom support the war. Unless we're going to believe that the self-selecting YouTube questioners were utterly different from the rest of American voters, it seems pretty clear that CNN ignored these complex -- and highly relevant concerns -- for an issue that served its ratings interests -- immigration -- or ones that made for moments of conventional television conflict, like gun control, which doesn't even show up in surveys of voters' concerns.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using some crackpot's query about the candidates' stand on Biblical inerrancy to do something that's anathema in our system -- to probe people's individual religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask candidates about policy issues -- say, abortion -- that might be influenced by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not ask them about those convictions themselves. It's nobody's business whether a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN's noxious laundering of this question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to embarrass Mitt Romney -- who happens to be a Mormon -- and, secondarily, to help Mike Huckabee -- who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and who happens to be television's campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN's incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.

In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

Yay Michael Moore! Kicks Wolfie's Lame-Ass Butt!

Okay, for the less slangy types let's call it:

"Michael Moore Chastises Wolf Blitzer Live on CNN in Heated Rebuttal"

And in kicking Wolfie's mealy-mouthed cowering spineless 'never speaks truth to power, only kicks down' butt, he kicked CNN's mealy-mouthed cowering butt and the symbolic butt of all cowering so-called mainstream media who as he stated not only didn't ask the hard questions about the Iraq War from pre-war to now, they aren't asking the hard questions about our dismal, shameful health care system now.

As Moore stated, Wolf Blitzer and CNN acted as spokespersons FOR Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neocon warhawks when Farenheit 911 came out -- yet it was Moore who got it right, not the lying, shuffling, mendacious, non-transparent administration.

And in this case and his new movie "Sicko" -- it is Moore who gets it right not Dr. Sanjay Gupta or CNN or most of the media who are still cowards bowing before the greedy gods of corporate news hucksters.


CNN and most practitioners of contempoary mainstream corporate journalism (I use that term lightly) are in fact slaves to the prevalent, ever-ambient and stupidly banal kind of obedience to authority.

I ♥ Michael Moore.

You can read and see it all at Michael Moore's website here.

Crooks & Liars has some viewable and downloadable video and links as well.

Brownback: Mentally Deranged Have a Right to Bear Arms, Women DON'T Have a Right NOT to Bear Children

Today with Wolfie:

Right-wing Brownback reiterates his repugneocon hypocritical commitment to the standard fascicratic right wing nutjob woman/child/people-hating beliefs:

Force women to bear children who can be murdered during unjust, illegal, mendacious wars abroad or by gun nuts & wackos after they're here.

Protect gun owners but not women, children, mentally ill, sick, disabled, elderly, poor ...

because Brownback is among those that only actually value theoretical life while in-utero. Fuhgeddaboutit once actually born — then you'll have total second-amendment rights for gun-totin' and head-blowin'-off!

Day 4: Still being censored by Google! Meanwhile if this blog ever reappears, Urge the networks to make their Sunday shows more balanced

If It's Sunday, It's Still Conservative
Special Media Report: How the Right Continues to Dominate the Sunday Talk ShowsSign the online petition: Urge the networks to make their Sunday shows more balanced.

Read the report online or download the pdf.

One time in 2003 Bob (CIA-outing traitor) Novak was actually quasi-HONEST!!!!

From a CNN Broadcast -- the old Capital Gang that also probably was part of what was 'destroying this nation' (though not quite as much as) as was the thankfully defunct Cross Fire
Aired January 18, 2003 - 19:00 ET

"

...the last thing that the hawks inside the administration, and their friends outside the administration, want is a coup d'etat that would replace Saddam Hussein. They want a war as a manifestation of U.S. power in the world and as a sign that the United States is capable of changing the balance of power and the political map of the Middle East.

There's no question that the last thing they want is Saddam Hussein put on a plane and taken away ...

Talking to a senior official, and he said to me, he said, Well, if we don't hit in Iraq, where are we going to hit? And they - it's a desire that the United States, the superpower, is going to manifest its authority to the rest of the world.

Listen, I just feel that this potential - this war, I just trust it comes off easily. But I have trepidation that it won't be easy, and there's going to be a terrible consequences from it.

"

He has defended it like the lying, cheating, traitorus, nationalist fascist, right-wing apologist scumbag that he truly is in the meantime. Now that he's a christian instead of being a non-practicing jew, he can burn in hell with his other fascist rightwing fanatical christian fundatmentalist co-lying co-conspirators.