NewsTrust - Media and Politics - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Deficit hawks attacking the wrong prey

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By David Sirota - Nov. 16 (Opinion) - When the House considered a health care expansion proposal that the CBO says will reduce the deficit by $11 billion a year, tea-party protesters and Congress' self-described "fiscal conservatives" opposed it on cost grounds. At the same time, almost none of them objected when Congress passed a White House-backed bill to spend $636 billion on defense in 2010. The hypocrisy is stunning

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Palin agonistes

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Howard Kurtz - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - You have to feel a twinge of sympathy for Sarah Palin.

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Jon Stewart Catches Sean Hannity Falsifying Footage To Make GOP Protest Appear Bigger

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Nov. 11 (Comedy News) - Sean Hannity and his team did more than cover the event. They not only inflated the number in attendance with their words, but actually used footage from a heavily-attended protest this summer to make this health care rally appear more popular. Hannity even pointed out that this was a huge crowd for a Thursday, when the protest footage they used was from a Saturday.

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The Real Danger of 'One Big Regulator'

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - Nov. 11 (Opinion) - Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn't have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all. Our current way of regulating the financial system is dysfunctional. Oversight is dispersed among numerous confusing bodies that at times have seemed to be racing each other to the bottom. Setting up One Big Regulator would end that problem. The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a "systemic risk" if they were to fail. Critics suggest the Fed is too close to the banks that it would be charged with cracking down on. What's more, the Fed's main task is monetary policy, so regulating banks would never receive the attention it deserves.

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Gordon Brown and Afghanistan: The hardest call of all

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - Nov. 11 (Opinion) - Gordon Brown can be blamed for many things about the way he has run the war in Afghanistan: not having a proper strategy, failing to communicate, failing to earn the respect of his senior generals or to anticipate a critical demand for helicopters or vehicles. But what he should not be attacked for is trying to talk honestly and honourably to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year old son James was killed fighting in Helmand. Encounters between prime ministers and voters can be pivotal. No one will forget the encounter between Diana Gould and Margaret Thatcher over which way the Belgrano was sailing when it was sunk by a British submarine. Nor when Sharron Storer nobbled Tony Blair about cancer services during an election. But this was not one of those ...

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Copenhagen already a success

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Globe and Mail - By Bruce Anderson - Nov. 10 (Opinion) - There is a huge dysfunction between the way the average voter comes at these issues and the way policy spokespeople in the corporate, environmental NGO and government worlds often do. And at no time is this more visible than when mega climate/carbon events like Copenhagen come around. Most people are worried that the planet is under a lot of pressure, and many believe the climate is changing as a result. Considerably fewer have examined the science behind climate change, and fewer still the complex formulae that are at the heart of greenhouse-gas reduction targets.

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Animal empathy and its political implications

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Frans de Waal - Nov. 10 (Opinion) - Are Americans lacking in empathy? You would almost think so hearing Rush Limbaugh mock Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms or Missouri Rep. Cynthia Davis opposing school lunches, saying that "hunger can be a positive motivator." The latest indicator came when Arizona Senator Jon Kyl felt that there was no need for employers to cover maternity care since he himself had never had any need for it.

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Why Are the Loudest Political Voices the Most Extreme?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

ABC News - By Lee Dye - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - Those bombastic self-appointed spokespersons who rant from both the political right and left are likely driven by the conviction that their extreme views are shared by the majority of the members of their political party, but they are probably wrong, according to new research.

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Obama watched documentary last night? FOX botched this one… | csmonitor.com

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:34:09 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - Nov. 04 -

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Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Thomas Frank - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look. What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call." One of the specific answers Mr. Beck wanted, on one of the days I watched his program last week, had to do with White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has been caught on film quoting one of those Mao Zedong aphorisms that wouldn't look out of place on a motivational poster. She also remarked that Mao was one of her "favorite political philosophers," an honor the Chinese Communist shared with Mother Teresa. Obviously Ms. Dunn was yet another person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr. Beck had uncovered within the government. What's more, no one would call that red phone to reassure Mr. Beck, to tell him that the Obama administration isn't crawling with traitors or to explain why his many nightmare scenarios will not actually come to pass.

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Whaddaya Mean Obama Hasn't Done Anything?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Esquire - By John H. Richardson - Nov. 03 (Comment) - A blow-by-blow breakdown of the young president's first year reveals that today's frustration stems not from a lack of policy so much as a lack of common ground. Therein lies the myth of the American center.

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The White House’s war with Fox News

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Louis Menand - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - In 2008, half the people who watched the Fox News Channel were over sixty-three, which is the oldest demographic in the cable-news business, and, according to a poll, the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.

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The Great American Ideological Crackup

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Jon Meachen - Oct. 24 (Opinion) - Which puts the Fox News affair in an interesting light. To the base, the White House looks tough, willing to hit back—all while the base is getting few of the substantive reforms it has fought for. I am not suggesting that the Obama administration has staged the Fox protest as a bread-and-circuses ploy in order to give otherwise dissatisfied Democrats something to cheer, but no matter what the intention, the contretemps has made the White House seem more progressive than it is.

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Fox wars

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Charles Krauthammer - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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Rohrabacher: House GOP leadership 'constantly trying to play a political game'

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:01:42 -0700

The Hill - Oct. 19 -

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A Roadmap to Health-Care Overhaul by Christmas

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Bloomberg - By Albert R. Hunt - Oct. 18 (Editorial) - Over the next couple of months, a sausage factory will seem tidier than the U.S. Congress. The disposition of the huge health-care overhaul will be a messy dance of legislation

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How Fox News Outsmarted the White House - Page 1

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By John Batchelor - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - The White House's war on Fox shows its ignorance of the network's true purpose: show business. And Team Obama is giving Murdoch just what he wants. After David Axelrod sneaked into Roger Ailes’ office in New York to powwow on Sept. 30, the White House brain trust of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel decided that it is shrewd and useful to attack Fox News as a Republican tool—or as White House Communications Director Anita Dunn remarked, as “a wing of the Republican Party.” It is a guess that the president is not annoyed by this tactic. It is a better guess that the White House has not had a chance, in its custard pie-throwing glee, to pause and consider why this is a stupid idea—not only unfair to all other networks that will become suspect, but also guaranteed to give comedy skits about Fox an attention around the globe not achieved since Walter Cronkite’s moon-landing moment.

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Why Declaring War on Fox News Could Be a Mistake for Obama

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Chris Rovzar - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - ... if Team Obama ignores Fox, it just gives the network's talent the chance to further caricature him as a socialist, foreign, effete, America-hating Other. It isn't a racist portrayal, necessarily, but is certainly one that gives actual racists a lot of comfort. Not countering that will help Fox viewers conveniently forget that Obama is intelligent and well spoken. George Bush, who certainly wasn't the latter, came across as human and likable in interviews. It was one of his greatest strengths (and for critics, one of his most confounding attributes).

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Fox: a news source in name only

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Oct. 04 (Opinion) - Fox is in a class by itself. In its epidemic inaccuracy, its ongoing disregard for basic journalistic standards of fairness, its demagogic appeals and its blatantly ideological promotions it is, indeed, unique — a news source in name only. That's not just an opinion: a 2003 study found Fox viewers more likely to be misinformed than those who get their news elsewhere.

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For ACORN, Truth Lost Amid the Din

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Harold Meyerson - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - Actual instances of voter fraud were all but nonexistent. Why you might not know that.

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Editorial: If you thought ACORN was bad ...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dallas Morning News - Sep. 23 (Editorial) - We've all heard plenty about a private U.S. government contractor whose employees were caught behaving unspeakably and which now faces the swift and brutal withdrawal of taxpayer dollars by a Congress demanding accountability. That was ACORN, of

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Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Frank Rich - Sep. 20 (Opinion) - Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

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A TiVo Challenge: Watching ObamaVision on a Sunday Morning

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Warren - Sep. 20 (Opinion) - Kristol and Obama didn't have a lot in common ideologically but were united by a reflexive penchant for the systematic and analytical. Coming from different ends of the political spectrum, they each embodied an empiricist thrust; by and large looking at policies and wondering, "Does this really work?" In an age in which the provocative (Beck) can trump the smart and correct, one can imagine Kristol, who once called a conservative "a liberal mugged by reality," and Obama actually getting along for hours in some quiet den, shooting the intellectual breeze.

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Slater: Matt Latimer recalls Kay Bailey Hutchison 'purse boys' in new book 'Speechless'

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dallas Morning News - By Wayne Slater - Sep. 18 (Comment) - Former George W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer admits being enamored of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison when he arrived as young staffer on Capitol Hill some years ago. "I thought a tough-talking Texas woman would be an ideal Republican presidential candidate someday," he writes in his new book, Speechless, which goes on sale next week. Then he met her.

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Limbaugh: We need segregated buses

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - Sep. 17 (Opinion) - On school bus attack that police now say wasn't racially motivated: "I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America."

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