Find out how Cooch took $55,000 from the disgraced "U.S. Navy Veterans Association," in apparent exchange for his promise to get the Virginia Office of Consumer Affairs (which had "notified Thompson's group that it no longer qualified for an exemption from state registration requirements") off the group's back. Can we say "pay-to-play?" Find out more.
David Axelrod, President Obama's political strategist, was interviewed by NPR's Steve Inskeep this morning:
INSKEEP: What do you think has happened im the states that the president, somewhat unexpectedly in some cases, won in 2008 where he seems to be in deep trouble now, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia, all states that he won in 2008 and it would be hard to find an analyst who is certain that the president is going to win all 3 of those states again?
AXELROD: Well, look, I think certainty is a hard thing to come by in American politics ...
INSKEEP: I think it'd be hard to find an analyst who thinks you have a good shot.
Let's just look at the numbers here. In 2008, President Obama beat John McCain by 7.2%. Obama is currently leading Mitt Romney in national polls by 4.4%. In Virginia, the latest poll from Mason Dixon on January 18 shows Obama leading Romney 45% to 44%. In North Carolina, a January 8 poll from Democratic-aligned PPP had Obama leading Romney 46% to 45%, while a January 11 poll from GOP-aligned Civitas had Romney leading Obama 48% to 39%. There has been no presidential polling that I can find in Indiana.
Do the "analysts" Steve Inskeep talks to work for the Republican Party? Who else would be telling Inskeep, "Obama's leading in Virginia? He has no shot!" And the trends are moving briskly in Obama's favor. Job growth just hit a two-year high. Mitt Romney's favorability numbers have been tanking incredibly hard for a month now, while President Obama's approval rating has been improving for five straight months.
The DC area's forecast for Friday calls for temperatures near 60 degrees with thunderstorms. In January.
But you won't catch our television weather presenters attributing the bizarre forecast to global warming loading the dice for extreme weather! No, sir! Expect to hear lots of things like, "Wow, tropical weather in January. Uh ... weird!"
If they mentioned our changing climate, they might get angry calls from viewers who find climate reality doesn't fit in with their political views. Here in the DC area, unless your name is Bob Ryan, you're likely to figure it's better to keep quiet about the facts than risk standing up for inconvenient truths. Or maybe, like Topper Shutt, you're a climate science denier yourself.
Learn more about why some TV weathermen aren't straight with their viewers about climate science at ForecastTheFacts.org.
So, the New York Times' public editor is asking - seriously, this is not an Onion parody - "whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Again, this is not meant as a joke; he's really asking the question. Let me help you, Mr. Brisbane.
YES!!!!!!!OF!!!!!!!COURSE!!!!!!!DUH!!!!!!!
Was that a clear enough answer? No? OK, then, here are a few examples to illustrate.
1. A politician, almost certainly a Republican't, claims that there's no scientific consensus on global warming (oh yes there is, big time!), or that there's some big conspiracy/scandal about a few random emails climate scientists sent (oh no there isn't!), or whatever other crazy/idiotic/ignorant/fallacious comment the Republican't politician made. In the article, you quote the Republican't, then immediately say something like, "of course, as everyone knows, THAT IS NOT TRUE, in fact it is a OUTRIGHT LIE." Got it?
2. Another politician, against almost certainly a Republican't, claims that "Obamacare" (not its real name, which should also be pointed out as a lie) increases the deficit. In the article, you quote the lying Republican't, then immediately say something like, "of course, as the non-partisan CBO says, THAT IS NOT TRUE, in fact it is an OUTRIGHT LIE." Got it?
3. Yet another politician, amazingly yet again a Republican't (sensing a pattern here?), claims that up is down, black is white, hot is cold, Obama's a Kenyan anti-colonialist, Democrats are really socialists, there's no such thing as evolution, the recession didn't start under President Bush, blah blah blah. Again, in the article, you quote the crazy/lying liar Republican't, then immediately say something like, "yes, these people are utterly nuts, factually challenged, pathological liars, etc." Got it?
Then, the media might actually start to regain a bit of the credibility it's utterly lost in recent years, by its constant perpetuation of an absurd and false "balance" between "both sides" of any "argument" (e.g., one side says the earth is flat, the other says it's round). But will they do that? I mean, reporting the facts and letting readers know when someone's telling a lie is just so hard, it would require reporters and editors to get off their fat behinds and actually do what they are getting paid good money to do. What a concept, huh?
Why is George Will so aggressively anti-climate science? A new report makes his financial incentives more clear. Media Matters reports that not only has Will been drawing a salary from his role on the board of the extremist-conservative Bradley Foundation, he's been writing about the front groups they fund without disclosing it in his Washington Post columns:
Media Matters reviewed Will's columns from mid-2008 to the present and found at least a dozen instances in which he has promoted conservative groups that have received money from the Bradley Foundation without disclosing his connection to the foundation. Those groups include the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society, and National Affairs quarterly.
SourceWatch has a full rundown of the Bradley Foundation's activities, funding everything from climate science denial to attacks on minorities as genetically unworthy of any public assistance. Just really the worst of the worst stuff. And as the Media Matters report details, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is completely indifferent to Will's lack of disclosure.
Now that 2011 is over, may the media reflections begin! 2011 was a year to remember, as well as a year to forget, for any number of different and varied reasons. The Arab Spring brought a wave of democratically-styled popular uprisings that have reshaped politics in the "crucible of empires" (i.e. the Middle East). 2011 also witnessed a historic do-nothing U.S. Congress who appeared more willing to send the U.S. into a global sinkhole than to compromise on matters of ideology (I'm referring to the GOP, of course).
Sadly, all of the momentous news stories that made 2011 a memorable year also overshadowed the issue of climate change in the media. According to The Daily Climate's archive of global media, there were 19,000 climate change-related stories in 2011, a 42% decline from the peak year of 2009. The dip in climate change coverage ironically came amid some of the world's most extreme and devastating natural weather events. The wildfires in Arizona, famine in the Horn of Africa, devastating hurricanes across broad swaths of the U.S., and the historic drought in Texas all occurred in 2011. In the U.S. alone, we witnessed 12 "extreme" natural disasters in 2011, a record-breaking number (extreme natural disasters are quantified as having caused $1 billion in damage or more).
With these extreme weather events so prominent across the globe, it would have been sensible for the media to refocus its attention on climate change. After all, isn't the media supposed to be an institution that looks out for "the people"? It seems clear in hindsight that the media coverage surrounding climate change was at odds with the severity of the dangers posed by this phenomenon.
This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year - and it's a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare.
[...]
The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there's a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they've bent over backwards to appear "balanced" - and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.
Way to go, guys.
I guess we might as well start calling it PolitiLie, PolitiCowards, or PolitiFAIL. Or all of the above. PoliticPathetic!
In a pathetic speech that demonstrated zero self awareness and blamed everyone but himself for his OWN horrible behavior, Herman "999" Cain just announced that he's "suspending" his campaign for President.
Who benefits from this? Clearly, according to Public Policy Polling (one of the best pollsters in the business):
If Herman Cain really ends up dropping out of the race Gingrich's surge should continue in the next few weeks, unless/until something starts happening to erode his popularity. Why? Because Cain's supporters absolutely love Gingrich. And they absolutely hate Mitt Romney.
Our last national survey found that Gingrich's favorability with Cain voters was 73/21. Meanwhile Romney's was 33/55. That's the same basic trend we've seen in every Republican primary poll we've done in the month of November. On average in 7 polls we've done this month Gingrich's favorability with Cain voters is 69/22. Romney's average is 31/57. In other words Gingrich's net favorability is 73 points better with Cain supporters than Romney's. Here's how they stack up:
In other words, right now Newt Gingrich has a huge smile on his face. Mitt Romney? Well, he's probably figuring out how he can flip flop and endorse "999" or whatever it takes to get Herman Cain's endorsement. Unlikely that will happen, though. Bottom line for Romney: he's in serious trouble heading into the Iowa caucuses in just 30 days or so. Personally, as a partisan Democrat, I couldn't be happier to see Newt Gingrich, with his tremendous character flaws/warts/etc. as the Republican nominee. But even if Mitt's the nominee, I'm confident that the American people will choose the infinitely better Barack Obama for reelection over the flip-flopping (including on his own flip flops! LOL), valueless, soulless, "corporations are people," career politician Mitt Romney. So, farewell to Bad Pizza Dude, watch out as the Newt-ster rises, and Go Obama (who also benefits if Newt wins the nomination)!
P.S. That's one less candidate for Krazy Kookinelli to question tonight on Faux "News." Such a shame.
P.P.S. How does Cain's wife do this pathetic "stand by your man" thing, when we all know that Cain is a serial and shameless adulterer? She really needs to divorce his sorry be-hind.
UPDATE: I couldn't agree more with John McCain's 2008 campaign manager, who says, "That Cain's candidacy was taken seriously for longer than a nano-second in a time of genuine crisis for the country raises fundamental questions about the health of the political process and the Republican party." I mean, seriously, "999" made Voodoo Economics look like it should be up for a Nobel Prize, and Herman Cain himself...my god, where do you even start with how crazy, wacky, weird, clueless, and unqualified to be president that guy was. Yet he actually LED the Republican field for a while, and was in double digits for longer than that? Yikes. This party is truly off the deep end. Of course, they were also off the deep end in 2008, when they - John McCain's campaign, that is - picked Sarah Freakin' Palin for VP. It's simply astounding to think what's happened to this once-great party...
It was 73 on [November 14], just four shy of the record high and is still mild today but changes are on the way which is what November is all about. November typically features wide temperature fluctuations in the Metro Area. Temperature swings of highs 10 degrees above average one day can be followed by days with high temperatures 10 degrees below average all in the same week. Although rare, it has snowed in November in the Metro Area (we were reminded it can snow in October as well) while November has also seen temperatures in the mid 70s. There have been instances of both extremes that Washingtonians have experienced on this date in the not too distant past.
To use a local example, this would be like writing an article about the recent history development in Arlington's Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and saying, "Some buildings are short while others are tall." While that's true, it also would be completely ignoring the easily perceived upward trend.
How worried should we be about this? According to Kos and many others, it sounds like the answer is "very worried." What do you think? Also, am I missing something here or is this an issue that should united the Tea Party, right-wing bloggers, progressive activists, pretty much anyone who runs a blog or website, and a lot of other people? If this bill's as bad as described, why would anyone support it, unless of course they were "bought and paid for" by wealthy interests?
Fresh off the latest study that Fox viewers are somehow even less informed about current events than people who don't watch the news at all, journalism professor & media critic Jay Rosen takes a closer look at why coverage is so biased at another of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp outlets, The Australian:
News Corp is a huge company, but it is not a normal company. However, it does not know that it's not a normal company. In fact, it denies this observation. In this sense denial is constitutive of the company and its culture. To work there, you have to share in this pervasive atmosphere of denial. [...]
For example: The Australian is a force for climate change denialism. But it does not know this about itself. Outsiders do know it, and they regularly point it out. The Australian reacts not by defending its actual stance on climate change but by trying to destroy those who accurately perceive it. The attempt at destruction is typically rhetorical but sometimes other methods are used, like threatening a lawsuit. The impression given is of a bully or thug. But that's really an after-effect of denial. Denial, I think, is the key to understanding the company.
Here's a surprising new finding: those who watch Fox News "are less likely to know what's going on in the world." Okay, so it's not such a surprise, and it hardly took a study for those of us who have discussed current events with viewers of Fox News to come to this conclusion. Nonetheless, the ramifications of this level of "more is less" political intelligence quotient is quite disturbing in regards to how well we can continue to function as a republic.
In our society, individual perceptions of world and domestic events appear to be increasingly filtered through wholly different perceptional lenses. This growing gap between how one group sees world and domestic events as compared to its counterpart makes the ability for political compromise more difficult. With the monumental failure of the congressional supercommittee, it is certainly compromise that has, at least momentarily, become an artifact of politics in the U.S.
The failure of the supercommittee does not, however, necessarily represent two different lens of perception unable to find common ground. We may never know how much of this failure was due to "pure" ideological differences and how much to the political pressure from constituents back home and lobbyists near the doorstep.
It is the political right, however, that Fox News appeals to and therefore it is these viewers who stand the greatest likelihood of having the facts wrong about a given issue. Not many individuals outside of the orbit of the Fox News universe would be surprised at this finding, but a strong republic relies on a well-informed citizenry, one that is willing to discuss issues of importance with respect and integrity. It seems ironic, uncomfortably so, that those on the right who claim to love their country so much appear to be the ones who are aggressively chipping away at its foundations the most. "Don't tread on me" has really come to mean, "ignorance is bliss."
I know this is very difficult for the corporate media, let alone the conservative-dominated media (a large chunk of it), to comprehend, but it's really NOT difficult to understand why the "supercommittee" failed. It's so NOT difficult, in fact, that Greg Sargent manages to boil it down to one (1) easy-to-understand sentence.
Democrats wanted the rich to pay more in taxes towards deficit reduction, and Republicans wanted the rich to pay less in taxes towards deficit reduction.
Is that really so hard to understand? No, it's not, for anyone with a high school education or higher (or lower, for that matter - this is really, really easy!).
Amazingly, though, the geniuses in the corporate and conservative media can't, or won't, report what happened honestly and accurately. They won't do this despite the fact that it's their job to do so - to explain what's happened in the news objectively and accurately, not just to lazily and mindlessly parrot political talking points handed to them, or whatever "everyone else" is saying. I mean, if that's all they're going to do, plus their absurd "on the one hand, on the other hand" false equivalency (which the corporate media has become infamous for), then why even bother "reporting" at all? If that's all they're going to do, then frankly they might as well just fold up their operations and go into a more lucrative business, since theirs is going steadily down the tubes regardless. Clearly, they're not adding any positive value here. To the contrary, what the corporate media's doing is actively harmful to helping the public understand what happened here, to analyze it and put in context, and ultimately to assign blame. As Greg Sargent adds, "Any news outlet that doesn't convey this basic fact to readers and viewers with total clarity is obscuring, rather than illuminating, what actually happened here." Which is, as Sargent explains very simply (again, even a lazy, mindless corporate media hack should be able to figure this one out), "the GOP proposal would have really meant is that that the wealthy would pay less in taxes towards deficit reduction than they would if we just did nothing, i.e., let the Bush tax cuts expire, as stipulated by current law."
So, how many of you are willing to bet the ranch that the corporate media will rise to the occasion here, starting on the tee-vee (aka, "idiot box") tonight? Personally, I wouldn't bet a really cheap lunch, let alone the ranch!
P.S. The corporate media might also want to report the fact that if we simply DO NOTHING, let current policy (including expiration of the Bush tax cuts) play out, U.S. budget deficits will be $7.1 TRILLION lower over the next 10 years than they would otherwise have been. That's a LOT more than what the "supercommittee" was talking about. Want to eliminate deficits entirely and go into surplus? Simple: combine the $7.1 trillion "do nothing" approach with the ditching of wasteful subsidies for oil companies, corn ethanol, mortgage interest deductions for rich people, and other utterly wasteful/stupid...uh, stuff. That would pretty much do the trick. Again, this isn't conceptually difficult to understand, it's just politically impossible to DO, because anti-government/anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist and his Repubiclan puppets won't allow it. End of story.
Andy Schmookler is running for Congress in the 6th Congressional District of Virginia, challenging the incumbent Congressman, Bob Goodlatte. An award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, Andy moved with his family to Shenandoah County in 1992. He is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
Many have noticed that it has become unusually difficult, in recent years, for Americans to talk constructively across the political divide. One reason for this regrettable development has been a change in our nation's media culture.
In the America I grew up in, we all got our news from similar, basically trustworthy sources. The people I recall were such excellent journalists as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, and Walter Cronkite on CBS.
Now, Americans have segmented themselves into audiences for different newscasts with different political slant.
That would not be a big problem-except for one thing. The people following these different sources of "news" are getting different sets of "facts."
The supposed "meteroric" rise of Herman Cain (if you call 25-27% in a few polls meteroric, which apparently the so-called MSM do) has been in the works for years. But for the seriousness of his attempts to destroy the economic security of most Americans (including moi) with his 9-9-9 plan, it would be laughable when Herman Cain presents as a presidential candidate. The emptiness, phoniness and hypocrisy runneth over. Cain has had the gall to blame unemployment, economic crisis and all the related negatives on the people suffering because of Bush, Republican and conservadem deregulators, and corporate malfeasance. But it is so much worse than those things.
Some Values! When Herman Cain talks about what is wrong with America, what he (a wealthy man) really means is that, in his mind, he doesn't make "enough." He wants Americans to hand over more of their hard-earned money in the form of tax increases, so people like him can pay less. 9-9-9 is the trifecta of arch-conservative ideas because it: 1) Destroys Social Security (by ending the payroll tax); 2) Destroys Medicare (by ending the payroll tax) and 3) Makes the middle class and poor pay thousands more in taxes, while helping the rich pay less than ever.
One man running for president has suffered the most unrelentingly negative treatment of all, the study found: Barack Obama. Though covered largely as president rather than a candidate, negative assessments of Obama have outweighed positive by a ratio of almost 4-1. Those assessments of the president have also been substantially more negative than positive every one of the 23 weeks studied. And in no week during these five months was more than 10% of the coverage about the president positive in tone.
In stark contrast, coverage of Republican presidential candidates, many of whom are far-right-wing extremists or just plain nuts, was mostly "neutral" or "net positive," with theocrat/village idiot Rick Perry in particular receiving fawning coverage (+12 points) from the corporate hack media (followed by "drill baby drill" Sarah Palin, who had a net positive coverage of +9 points, and crazy eyes Michele Bachmann at +8 points).
The only Republican candidates receiving significantly net negative coverage by the corporate hack media were media-basher (a coincidence?) Newt Gingrich (-20 points) and former candidate/loser Tim Pawlenty (-18 points). Herman Cain, who denies climate science, "jokes" about building an electrified fence that would KILL Mexican migrants trying to enter the country, says that liberals actively want to destroy America, etc., gets a +5 positive media coverage rating. In other words, the media thinks it's fine if you say absolutely insane, ignorant, or hateful things, as long as you're a right winger. Would a "liberal media" do this? Of course not. After this study, can anyone possibly believe in the myth of a "liberal media?" Nope. Am I asking rhetorical questions in order to mock Mitt Romney? Yes, in fact I am. :)
As more Americans begin to raise their Constitutionally protected speech in protest of the class warfare waged against them, all manner of freepers and wingers mount a heightened and extreme reaction. Perhaps none is so over-the-top (and despicable) as the ranting of Glenn Beck. By telling his minions the slanderous fiction that "They will come for you and they will drag you in the streets and kill you," Beck clearly tries to incite his minions to violent reaction against fictitious threat.
Fortunately, progressive pundits are rebutting the mischaracterizations. Rachel Maddow is rightfully outraged by the media and wrong-wing mis-characterization of the protestors. Jon Stewart has been at his best as he has skewered the hysterical reaction by the hard-"right" to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Perhaps not coincidentally, the show's next-day reruns on Comedy Central throughout the day have disappeared. Is this Sumner Redstone's revenge? (You either have to watch at 11 PM or DVR it.) Paul Krugman begin his recent column as follows:
"It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America's direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent. And this reaction tells you something important - namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called "economic royalists," not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Reporting means more than just uncritically repeating a candidate's talking points and calling it a day. It requires judging what politicians say by the only appropriate standard of journalism, the truth.
By this standard, the Washington Post's coverage of Romney's trite militaristic speech the other day fell miserably short.
First of all, can someone please tell me exactly what a "muscular" foreign policy is? Does it mean we invade other countries at will, even say, when it costs us a trillion dollars with no benefit?
Was Hitler "muscular"? Is it a good thing to be? I guess it must be, since its apparent opposite, a "flaccid" policy, doesn't sound too great.
"Muscular", in this context, is an utterly meaningless adjective used simply to make warmongers like Romney sound cooler and sexier. It is in short, a marketing term -- not a journalistic one.
Beyond such phony packaging, the Post story failed to challenge Romney's muscular manhandling of the facts on at least 4 key points.
Over at The Green Miles, my fellow progressive, Virginia (and environmental) blogger Miles Grant explains how the Post stole his story about how global warming might bring armadillos to Virginia. Miles points out that just 2 days after he published his piece, "the Washington Post's Post Local did the exact same story." Without any attribution or credit, of course. Why "of course?" Because the Washington Kaplan Post does this all the time. For instance:
*As Miles points out, "Just last month, the Post-owned Fairfax Times stole a quote from ArlNow.com without attribution."
*On July 20, I broke the story on Barbara Favola receiving a $2,500 donation from Advanced Towing, then voting 5 days later to give the Arlington towing industry (including Advanced Towing) $250k more per year. A day later, the Kaplan Post ran with the story, but without any credit or attribution of any kind to Blue Virginia, which was tipped off about the story, then researched it and wrote it up (aka, "broke the story").
*It happened again today with this Post story, about Keith Fimian starting a PAC to help the Virginia GOP. The only problem? Again, Blue Virginia broke that story, this time back in July -- over two months ago. So, did we get any credit from the Kaplan Post for this? Hahahahaha, you must be kidding -- this is the for-profit "education"/corporate hack/desperate-to-stay-in-business-at-any-cost/Kaplan Post we're talking about. C'mon!
*This isn't just a recent phenomenon. Check out this 2006 Media Bistro story, in which "A story in Saturday's paper on mass firings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art failed to credit the influential blog where the news first broke."
*It's not just blogs, either; check out this story, in which "the Washington Post issued a rare apology for publishing two stories last month that included 'substantial material that was borrowed and duplicated, without attribution, from The Arizona Republic newspaper. '"
*Also, check this out (h/t to a commenter on TheGreenMiles).
I've written to the Post ombudsman about this multiple times over the past few months, and he's said he would look into it. So far, though, I'm not seeing any improvement in the Post's behavior. In fact, based on the fact that they just stole two Virginia bloggers' stories in the span of 24 hours, it appears that they're actually getting worse! Amazing.
In early January, at a closed-door retreat for the GOP caucus in Baltimore, Cantor gave a speech trying to reframe the debt ceiling as "a leverage moment" over Obama. "I made the point that, look, this is an opportunity for us because we are in essence a blocking minority in Washington," he told me.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) at a Capitol Hill news conference:
"I think at this point Washington has become so dysfunctional that we've got to start focusing on the incremental progress we can make," Cantor said.
The New York piece by Jason Zengerle is worth reading in its entirety to get a complete sense of how full of himself Rep. Cantor really is (and how he surrounds himself with sycophants who remind him if he ever forgets). But these quotes are as much of an indictment of the Beltway media as of Cantor himself. Why NOT talk out of one side of your mouth to your base & another to sound reasonable to the general public as long as the media refuses to point that out? All we get is, "Obama says one thing, Cantor says another, who can say who's reasonable? We'll have to leave it there."
This is an interesting speech, very similar to what I interviewed Annabel Park's partner Eric Byler about in 2007 for the book, "Netroots Rising." Key points by Annabel:
*The internet, along with social media tools like smart phones, inexpensive video cameras, etc. are a democratizing force
*De facto, this makes all of us reporters.
*This allows all of us to "report on the truth," not just rely on the corporate media.
*This is the way towards a "paradigm shift" for "real political change," to "people power" from "corporate power," from "profit-driven media" to "truth-driven media."
*According to Annabel, we all need to say, "I'm the one that I can trust to tell this story."
Which brings us to blogs like ours here at Blue Virginia, a community blog where you are free and encouraged - within our posting guidelines, of course (see the "About" section on the right side of this page) - to post your reports, to tell the truth, to stand up to lies, corporate power, and "the same old manufactured reality that we're seeing on television and produced by profit-driven corporate media." Unless, as Annabel points out, "we do something about it." I couldn't agree more.
The purpose of Blue Virginia is to cover Virginia politics from a progressive and Democratic perspective. This is a group blog and a community blog. We invite everyone to comment here, but please be aware that profanity, personal attacks, bigotry, insults, rudeness, frequent unsupported or off-point statements, and "trolling" (NOTE: that includes outright lies, whether about climate science, or what other people said, or whatever) are not permitted and, if continued, will lead to banning. For more on trolling, see the Daily Kos FAQs. Also note that diaries may be deleted if they do not contain at least 2 solid paragraphs of original text; if not, please use the comments section of a relevant diary. For more on writing diaries, click here. Thanks, and enjoy!
I couldn't agree more with 
I know this is very difficult for the corporate media, let alone the conservative-dominated media (a large chunk of it), to comprehend, but it's really NOT difficult to understand why the "supercommittee" failed. It's so NOT difficult, in fact, that 
Andy Schmookler is running for Congress in the 6th Congressional District of Virginia, challenging the incumbent Congressman, Bob Goodlatte. An award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, Andy moved with his family to Shenandoah County in 1992. He is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
Reporting means more than just uncritically repeating a candidate's talking points and calling it a day. It requires judging what politicians say by the only appropriate standard of journalism, the truth.
