News Roundup for 10/14/11
George Soros (Reuters file photo)
-Headline of the Day-
“Reuters’s Dizzying Changes to Its Soros-Occupy Wall Street Story.”
Yesterday, Reuters posted a story about how it looked like shadowy gazillionare and source of all evil George Soros was behind all of this Occupy Wall Street business. Their evidence? Soros once gave money to a group that gave money to a group involved with OWS — so that sounds super-solid already, right?
And it turns out that Soros gave money to the group that gave money back in 2009 and 2007 — long before OWS was anybody’s idea for anything. At this point, the reporting hinges on “if you squint real hard and drink a lot of vodka and ignore the fact that time exists, it kind of looks like maybe its possible that George Soros had maybe something to do with all this. Maybe.”
So not everyone was sold on this and people started pointing out that this was really shitty reporting. At this point, Reuters changed the story to “Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests.” No, really. Apparently good reporting now involves the process of elimination. Look for the big, widely distributed story that Lexx Luthor isn’t behind this thing either.
But the fixed story is not the only version that Reuters is distributing — they also feature the unfixed story, in case that’s what you like better.
So, if you live in the real world, then you can learn that George Soros has been ruled out as the mastermind behind the 99-percenters. If you’re a Tea Party nutjob who blames George Soros every time it rains, then the uncorrected version is the one for you.
And through it all, the story has been updated and rewritten to death, when the most obvious solution would be a retraction. “Reuters cannot — must not — get a reputation as a right-wing media outlet,” writes Reuters’ own blogger Felix Salmon. “We have to report the news as impartially as we can. In this case, there was no story, and nothing to report. Inventing a tenuous and intellectually-dishonest link between Soros and OWS might get us traffic from Matt Drudge — but that’s traffic which, frankly, we don’t particularly value or care for.”
If that’s the case, maybe leaving an uncorrected version of the story up for wingnut blogs to link to isn’t the wisest decision ever. (Atlantic Wire)
-Wall Street reconsiders this “too big to fail” stuff-
Click to embiggen
Why do citizens have a monopoly on the citizenry? (DailyKos)
-Bonus HotD-
“Moody’s Economist Says GOP Jobs Bill Would ‘Likely Push The Economy Back Into Recession.’”
Which is weird, because that’s exactly what it did when it was called “Bush’s economic plan.” (ThinkProgress)
Stories to Watch: 10/13/11
Sorry for the late headlines, but for some reason a windows update was sucking up all my CPU power. Never did that before. I couldn’t get anything to work, so I decided to let the updater run its course while I got something to eat. Seems to be working fine. Now here’s the [somewhat abbreviated] news…
A Reuters story trying to tie the 99-percenters to George Soros is so weak that even a Reuters blogger can’t get behind it.
A Wall Street CEO writes a very strange op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that seems to blame President Obama for ungrateful panhandlers.
Remember how Michael Bloomberg said the Wall Street protesters could stay as long as they wanted? Yeah, that was bullshit. He’s trying to run them out again.
Americans support Occupy Wall Street and oppose the Tea Party. This is a fact the ‘baggers don’t seem to like much.
Can we all stop pretending that Paul Ryan is some sort of economic genius now?
Finally, Ron Paul’s got the mange or something.
News Roundup for 9/30/11
One of the many once-new things that have failed to go away
-Headline of the Day-
“Newt Gingrich: Marriage Equality ‘Is A Temporary Aberration That Will Dissipate.’”
Newt Gingrich’s strategy for staying relevant to the 2012 Republican Primary seems to involve saying increasingly stupid things. Of course, if that worked we’d still be talking about Michele Bachmann.
Anyway, Newt’s breaking new ground in ways to protect marriage from the Homosexual Menace — ignore gay marriage and it’ll go away.
“I believe that marriage is between a man and woman,” Gingrich said in Iowa today. “It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate. I think that it is just fundamentally goes against everything we know.”
The problem here is that you can apply this reasoning to a whole bunch of stuff that hasn’t gone away — butt floss swimsuits, hula hoops, and democracy are a few that leap immediately to mind.
“Given his own marital history,” the report opines, “Gingrich’s belief in the solvent nature of same-sex marriage is mildly amusing.”
Wait, “mildly amusing?” It’e freakin’ hilarious. (ThinkProgress)
-Cartoon time with Mark Fiore-
Hey kids, you know how we used to turn to FEMA in a natinal emergency? Well, that’s all changed! Now we turn to…
Click for animation
I’ll bet we could blow people up in another country without too much bother, though. (MarkFiore.com)
-Bonus HotD-
“Huckabee looks again at Republican presidential bid.”
Long story short, a group of “Republican and conservative activists” are saying, “Anyone but this bunch of clowns who are already running!” (Reuters)
Stories to Watch: 7/29/11
One good thing about a heat wave; the grass doesn’t grow. But now it’s over and it’s back to the absurdity of harvesting a crop once a week and throwing it away. Somebody please come up with something better. This is stupid. Now here’s the news…
Sen. Chuck Schumer says, “It’s hard to imagine the Senate Republicans would actually filibuster the nation into default.” I hope I’m not writing later about Schumer’s lack of imagination.
David Kurtz offers a much more detailed and much less optimistic assessment of the debt ceiling situation; “[E]ven though my gut says there’s no way the U.S. is stupid enough to default, I still can’t see a clear, viable way out of this.”
Dana Millbank sees Boehner’s failure to push through his bill last night as a vote of no confidence for the Speaker.
Let me give you an idea of how insane the debt debate in Washington has become; Reuters reports that growth is “anemic” and that the debt standoff risks recession. So, of course, everyone agrees that this is the perfect time to reduce demand and increase unemployment by drastically cutting spending. DC is officially an irresponsible bubble of crazy completely insulated from reality. “I realize it’s fallen out of fashion to talk about things such as economic growth and job creation, and it’s apparently far too late for a conversational detour,” writes Steve Benen, “but it’s worth appreciating the jaw-dropping disconnect between what’s needed and what’s being discussed by policymakers.”
Jon Stewart has been on fire lately.
Krugman once again takes on the brainless, kneejerk, lazy evil of centrism. Irony alert: he does so while filling in for David Brooks.
Finally, The New Republic points out that the GOP no longer has a coherent foreign policy — in fact, it looks like they don’t have a foreign policy at all. Noeconservatism has failed and now they have no idea what to believe.
Stories to Watch: 3/30/11
Cooking chicken. You can’t have any. Now here’s the news…
Reuters breaks news that the Obama administration has secretly ordered the arming of Libyan rebels. Needless to say, this opens up a whole can of worms.
In an effort to show their trying to avoid a government shutdown, House Republicans introduce the Government Shutdown Prevention Act. Of course, these are Republicans, so bill titles always mean the opposite of what they say.
Republicans are all about local control, so it only stands to reason that a congress critter from Ohio gets to run the DC school district.
Wisconsin Rep and former reality TV star Sean Duffy’s complaint about low congressional pay prompts the GOP to try to erase the statement from history. Luckily, they failed. Sean Duffy will forever be remembered as the guy who couldn’t make it on $174,000 a year.
Just because he’s a private citizen now doesn’t mean that former Senator Russ Feingold is going away.
More fun with local control: NJ Republican Rep. Chris Smith takes a trip to end all abortion in Kenya — even in the case of a threat to the life of the mother — because that’s a super-important thing for America, I guess. It’d be business as usual for a photo-op-seeking GOPer trying to shore up his anti-choice street cred, except he went there on the taxpayers’ dime. Way to cut that deficit, GOP.
Finally, Tennessee moves to all but outlaw science in the classroom. Welcome to the 19th century!
