Most working people in America don’t have the time to pay close attention to the daily ins and outs of politics. What they know of the political system they hear from quick blurbs in passing on television news while they are busy providing dinner for their families, or what they hear on the radio in the car on their commute to and from work. More educated liberal Democrats tend to get more of this news from public radio, but for the average Southerner, this tends to come from talk radio.
More and more people are getting their news from social networking tweets on Twitter and Facebook, but unless they take the time to delve into the details of the story links, they will still only obtain a superficial outlook on public policy debates.
For those who take the time to find an independent journalist to follow closely, they will over time end up with a better understanding of how democracy works, the so-called “sausage factory” that is government.
One thing that I think tends to sometimes escape the understanding of the average American, who now tends to believe there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, is the extent to which the party in power gets to set the daily agenda for what issues are brought up in public debates in Congress and state Legislatures. This is one of the most powerful tools any political party has to control what we all talk about on a daily basis, whether people fully grasp this or not.
Editor’s Note: I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say to my friends who live in the reality-based community in places such as New York, Washington, D.C., on the West Coast and in Europe. I would rather eat nails (which would be hard considering how many teeth I have left) than to have to write this story. But I feel a certain obligation to let people the world over know just how bad things are in a place called Alabamaland.
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It should have come as no great surprise considering where we are, but I must say, I was a bit taken aback when I saw this story hit Pam’s List yesterday and when I got the e-mail message from the Alabama Democratic Party responding to it.
You see, my friends, we have a new Republican state Senator in the Northern part of Alabama who is named after a famous character from the Bible. Although his mommy and daddy couldn’t spell very well, I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. McGill had the best of intentions when they named their son Shadrack.
Surely even my atheist friends will remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were allegedly thrown in a fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar II, the King of Judah, but walked out alive thanks to a surprise appearance by someone named “Christ.”
Well, it must seem like a modern-day version of being forced into a fiery furnace for Mr. McGill these days, because every time he opens his mouth, something crazy comes out, and he gets written up in the press somewhere like he is a complete moron.
Do weird things ever happen to you when you first wake up in the morning that make your day start to spin off in strange directions before you know it?
Surely this happens to everyone from time to time. The question is, how do you handle it? What do you do about it? Take Ritalin?
That might not be the best approach, as recently reported. Sometimes I write about these things. Often there are larger insights to be had if you stop and think before you react and don’t let a quick emotional response govern your actions.
Of course even writing about these things will inevitably result in some folks overreacting or misinterpreting their meaning, but that’s human nature I suppose. I’m interested in what can be learned from these incidences. I trust you are too. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
Disgraced former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who managed to get enough dingbat evangelical Christian Republicans to vote for him to win the South Carolina Primary, went down to Florida and launched the biggest moonbat idea of the 2012 presidential race so far: A Lunar colony that could petition to be the 51st state in the United States when it reaches 13,000 residents.
Don’t believe it? What planet have you been living on lately? It’s all over every news channel. Here are a couple of sample videos (science analysis below).
There’s a conspiracy afoot, and the good tea party folks and great commentators at Fox News are not going to like it.
No one in the Obama administration will send out a press release to announce it either. Oh, they are such behind the scenes manipulators like the American people have never seen before.
Yes, it is such a dramatic and diabolical conspiracy that if he were alive today, Mark Twain would break out the aged whiskey and the good cigars and call a conference in Concord to discuss it at great length.
It is not such a quick and easy point that you can bring it down on people like an anvil shot from a cannon onto their heads. It is not something you can get across in a Facebook comment or a Twitter tweet. No, this is such an awful and compelling tale that you have to spend the time to construct an entire blog post to get the point across.
Here’s how a definition gone wrong can lead to a debilitating public controversy. But hey, controversy drives traffic, so what the heck, right?
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It’s been a long time, but the New York Times is back in the business of pumping up the traffic to its Website with news about itself.
Predictably, once again, it is doing the news organization’s reputation more harm than good in the long run. Will they ever learn from their own history? The documents are right there under their noses.
The problem is, it might cost them a massive amount of corporate advertising to tell the truth, and they would lose a few Republican readers in the process.
An explanation is in order. You came to the right place for this one.
When I first opened my eyes and looked at the LaCross clock and temperature gauge Tuesday morning, it was 24-degrees outside in the Pinson Valley campsite. The local weather guys and gals on TeeVee say it was the coldest night of the winter so far.
Outside, the water in the bird bath is frozen, but the cardinals, finches and chickadees keep warm by flying back and forth between limbs in the dogwood tree, taking turns at the feeder.
The cold doesn’t bother me so much anymore, as long as there is a warm sleeping bag by a heater or a fire. The heat of summer is more annoying these days, perhaps because I have spent most of my life in the Sun Belt.
What annoys me more than heat or cold is ignorance.
On the final day of 2011 as I sit here sipping my coffee trying to remember, perusing the other top story lists and trying to figure out a way to sum it all up from here, one thing occurs to me. While the protesters in the Arab world and the Occupy protests are making all the lists, I can’t find one single mention of the protesters in Wisconsin or the reenergized efforts of organized labor across the U.S. on any of the lists.
Could it be that the American news media’s anti-union bias is at work here?
The tea party Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have been defeated and humbled, so even though Christmas is not my favorite time of year, I have some Christmas cheer.
But that’s not why I’m writing today.
Over the past few days, my thinking has developed a little more on the subject of what constitutes “objective” journalism. So I want to get these thoughts down before I forget.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
