TL;DR
Interesting news stories: Linked to, and summarized poorly
With all of the commotion about Obama’s recent Presidential Address, his much more telling Q and A session at a Republican retreat might have been pushed aside. While the Address was impressively candid after an initial bout of motivational rhetoric, this open debate with a room full of GOP House members is golden. The President played the roll of professor, answering the inquiring students as if their questions weren’t backhanded attempts to catch him in a lie. And he didn’t stumble once. It’s beautiful to see a president fact check numbers on a House member who had obviously assumed that, out of the thousands of documents the president must read every day, he hadn’t read his. And he didn’t leave his criticism to the GOP alone. He chastised both parties’ political leaders for what’s become the political norm in the last 6 months; basing political activity on partisan, campaign minded goals instead of the interests of the people who elected them.
Here’s a few of the best moments and the full video:
On the Health Care struggle:
Component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year. Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker and Tom — and certainly you don’t agree with Tom Daschle on much — but that’s not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate, and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot.
An appeal to Republicans:
So all I’m saying is we’ve got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I’m not suggesting that we’re going to agree on everything, whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.
I mean, the fact of the matter is is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, “This guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.”
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CBS rejected gay dating website, Mancrunch.com’s Super-bowl ad. And they’re going to air a Pro-Life commercial featuring Tim Tebow, his mother, and a solid factual inaccuracy*. There goes their excuse of not airing advocacy campaigns. Reminder to CBS: The FCC still has you by the balls, CSI in syndication is just as good, and the internet exists. A couple quotes from the United Church Of Christ (very accepting to gay members) and the GLAAD:
UCC:
“[w]hile CBS is reportedly saying that a bad economy now necessitates changes in its policy on so-called advocacy ads, this decision only underscores the arbitrary way the networks approach these decisions and the result is a woeful lack of religious diversity in our nation’s media,” says the Rev. J. Bennett Guess, the UCC’s director of communications. “Because of its own economic circumstances, CBS is affording time to one religious organization while having suppressed another. This sounds as if the broadcasters think they own the airwaves when, in theory at least, they do not”
GLAAD:
“CBS’s decision to run a Focus on the Family ad during this year’s Super Bowl can’t and shouldn’t be considered in a vacuum. CBS spent years denying a platform to an LGBT-inclusive church that wanted to share a message of inclusion with a national audience. Now, when it happens to be financially inconvenient for CBS to hold to the standard it had previously imposed, the network’s expediency benefits a virulently anti-gay organization whose advocacy on these issues is the antithesis of that of the United Church of Christ.”
Link:http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/29/news/companies/mancrunch_ad_super_bowl/index.htm?cnn=yes&hpt=T2
*In the commercial, Pam Tebow’s going to say that, during her pregnancy in the Philippines, doctors urged her to have an abortion. That cry-baby/man-child producing cow is probably lying. Abortion was illegal in the Philippines.
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A very interesting article from the BBC featuring a foreign prospective on the current political state of America. Look out for the great quotes from GW from the 2000 presidential debate.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8474611.stm?
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743 pounds of marijuana was found in a septic tank on a truck presumably traveling from Mexico. Over $400,000 in street value, the bags were found buried beneath human waste. Honestly, is digging through thousands of pounds of poop really worth it? Did that guy go home that night and tell his wife, “yeah, I’ll smell like other people’s feces for weeks, but nobody in these Southern Arizona suburbs ‘ll be gettin’ high for a month”
Link: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/01/29/arizona.marijuana.bust/index.html?hpt=T2
