Stories to Watch: 10/14/11
Got some stuff I need to do later and I’m running out of time right now, so tonight’s going to be a shorty. Now here’s the news…
Another day, another violent police action against the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Police and city governments should probably be aware that every incident like this is a PR coup for the movement. In other words, if you want them to go away, you’re doing it wrong.
On the anti-Wall Street front; something’s up. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner promises “dramatic enforcement actions” against financial criminals.
Josh Marshall detects a distinct shift away from deficits and toward jobs.
An appeals court blocks parts of Alabama’s insane anti-immigration law.
Do regulations kill jobs? The answer is no.
Finally, the rapture preacher is back with a new date for the end of the world.
News Roundup for 3/28/11
Only porn-addicted commies know what any of this means
-Headline of the day-
“Are Your Kids Reading Reddit.com & Should You Be Worried?”
Glenn Beck’s fake-news site, The Daily Blaze, asks those two questions and can only answer one; YES, YOU SHOULD BE AFRAID! FREAK OUT! FREAK OUT!!
See, Reddit is “part news aggregator, part message board, and it’s driven by viewer-posted content. Innocent enough. Until you realize it also features porn.”
Oh my God… Porn… On the internet. Sweet Jesus…
Of course, this makes it like pretty much every social bookmarking site. So what makes Reddit stand out for DB scrutiny? If you read through the report, nothing really. There are some porny subreddits you can subscribe to or not subscribe to — nothing’s forced on anyone and, if you want to find them, you’ve really got to look. Mostly it’s goofy photos of cats and complaints about AT&T’s bandwidth caps.
Wait, did I mention that Reddit is overwhelmingly liberal or left-leaning? Yeah, here’s the front page of the politics subreddit, which ought to give you an idea what sort of a problem Beck’s site might really have with Reddit. It’s all “Yay for Wikileaks” and “war sucks” and “rich people aren’t taxed enough” and “Glenn Beck’s squirrelly.”
“Could it be time to add it to your list of blocked sites?” asks concern troll DB. “Or, is it just free speech at work?”
I vote the latter and suspect that’s Beck’s problem with it. Why knock yourself out fighting for censorship when you can convince gullible morons to do all the censoring for you? (Daily Blaze, via porn-riddled Reddit)
-Trapped in the narrative-
When Republicans won big last year, the media was all like “everyone wants to cut spending big time!” Never mind that polls show people want jobs and Republican candidates promised jobs — Republicans are cutting spending, Republicans won, and that means everyone is supposed to want to cut spending. Except they don’t.
This is confusing if you’re a media type.
Which describes Alexander Burns over at Politico. Burns writes that you’ve got all these Republican governors going crazy with the spending cuts and — WTF? — nobody likes it. Their polling numbers are crashing and, in places like Wisconsin, everyone’s all “recall those bastards!” Seriously, what gives?
So Burns talked to a bunch of Republicans (because they’re the only serious people on the planet) and it turns out that voters are just crazy and we don’t know what they want. Sure, GOP governors are taking a whole bunch of stuff away from us, while handing over the keys to the bank to corporations and the wealthy, but that’s just what serious budget-cutting looks like. Really, it’s all just belly-aching and people will come around. Don’t you worry.
“The gist of the piece is that ‘we’ all agree that the message of the 2010 election was that the public has decided that government is too big and wants dramatic budget cuts,” comments Josh Marshall. “But now it seems like the governors who are really going whole hog on this — overwhelming Republicans — are getting really unpopular. Ergo, the public isn’t really ready for the ‘grown-up conversation’ about budgets that it seemed they might be.”
The problem isn’t that Republicans aren’t listening to constituents — although, they aren’t. The problem is that constituents aren’t listening to the governors. Until voters are eager to hand over their wallets to insanely rich people, voters aren’t really serious about deficits. (Politico)
-Bonus HotD-
“After ThinkProgress Video Stokes Controversy, Herman Cain Disavows Pledge Not To Appoint Muslims.”
That’s what you like about Republicans: they have the courage it takes to stand by their convictions — until those convictions prove unpopular.
Then they never held those convictions at all. (ThinkProgress, with video)
Scott Walker’s Kamikaze Run at Jobs
Things in Madison seem to be moving in the right direction. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall reported yesterday that signs point to the Wisconsin GOP losing cohesion on the governor’s “budget repair bill.” Republicans could’ve taken the sticking point — collective bargaining — and passed it as a stand-alone bill. Since it wouldn’t have been a fiscal bill, the rules for a twenty member quorum wouldn’t have applied. But Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald says that this isn’t going to happen and that they won’t pass the bill until the filibustering Democrats return to Wisconsin.
Marshall writes that this means there’s “no clear option for Walker absent some agreement with the Democrats.” Scott Walker may be politically suicidal, but Wisconsin Republicans don’t seem to share his eagerness for self-destruction.
Still, whenever Wisconsin is in danger of easing our unemployment rate, Scott Walker comes to drag us back from the brink. He’s killed a high-speed rail project — and all the jobs it would’ve created. He’s killed a power plant in Madison, he’s trying to regulate the wind power industry out of existence, he’s refused stimulus funding for wiring schools for broadband. Now, he’s threatening to lay off as many as 1,500 state workers. This is a man who came into office promising a quarter of a million new jobs. He’s doing it wrong.
And these are the question the media should be asking — what about all those jobs? When is Walker going to get to work on that? And isn’t threatening massive layoffs contrary to that promise? Doesn’t that make Scott Walker something of a liar? Why is it that every time we might actually reduce unemployment, Scott Walker gets in the way?
You know what would be a great way to increase state revenues? Get people to work. You know what’s a lousy way to increase state revenues? Laying off people and making an already rough job market even more competitive, driving down wages. The question of the day should be, “Why does Governor Walker keep killing jobs?”
And it sounds like, behind the scenes, these are questions being asked by Wisconsin Republicans. Walker is leading his party to disaster with this overreach. A new poll from GQR Research for the AFL-CIO shows that Walker is losing Wisconsin voters.
Talking Points Memo:
Sixty-two percent of respondents to the poll said they view public employees favorably, while just 11% said they had an unfavorable view of the workers whose benefits packages Walker says are breaking the state budget.
Meanwhile, just 39% of respondents had a favorable view of Walker, while 49% had an unfavorable view of the freshman Republican governor. Voters are split on his job performance, with 51% saying they disapprove of the job Walker has done.
“Since the protests began, Governor Walker has seen real erosion in his standing,” the GQR pollsters write in their analysis, “with a majority expressing disapproval of his job performance and disagreement with his agenda.”
He’s losing his party, he’s losing the public, and he’s losing all hope for reelection. All within a month of taking office. If he continues his bullheaded foolishness, I wouldn’t be surprised if Republicans take him down — if only for self-preservation.
-Wisco
